


and there, persephone falls

by thegirl



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Consensual Underage Sex, F/M, Female Jon Snow, Genderbending, I've wanted to read this fic so long I decided to write it, Kidnapping, Marriage, Stealing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-28 12:50:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2733152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirl/pseuds/thegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t ever want to leave this cave, Jo.” Yves says to her, in a whisper, like he’s not allowed to be happy, not allowed to love her, like it makes him weak. In response, Jo winds her arm around the back of his neck, and pulls him close for another kiss.</p><p>“Let’s stay longer then, lover.” she says against his lips. She feels his smile, even if she’s too close to see it.</p><p>...</p><p>Or: Joanna Snow gets stolen from her bed in the middle of the night, and finds she doesn't mind as much as she thought she would.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1.

**Author's Note:**

> Not even kidding, I have wanted to read this story for such a long time I eventually said 'fuck it' and wrote it myself because I got impatient.

Jo wakes up with a start. She isn’t quite sure why - she doesn’t need the toilet, it isn’t morning, and she is still tired. She’s about to attribute it to Ghost moving in her sleep and inadvertently waking her up, and snuggle back under her furs, when in the shadows of her chamber she sees movement.

It’s strange, seeing something move in almost pitch black. It almost seems that the darkness is cloaking the monsters within it. Jo is suddenly reminded of when she was seven and Theon convinced her there were monsters under her bed. It had taken her Lord Father a month to convince her otherwise. Jo suddenly realizes she’s stopped breathing, and takes a very small breath of air, aware of the sound in the painful silence.

She isn’t alone, and quite suddenly her body begins to function again after a gap for shock - her heart thumps a painful tattoo against her ribcage, her throat dries up and her teeth clench together so hard her jaw hurts.

Jo tries wildly to fix again on the figure, who doesn’t know she knows they’re there, while slowly, oh so slowly trying to remember where she put the bone dagger Robb had given her for her nameday.

Her bedside table. Still feigning sleep, she rolls over as if tossing and turning, trying not to clench her eyes tight shut - the last thing she needs to do is have the intruder somehow figure she’s awake and jump on her before she’s ready.

She bides her time for another good five minutes, and has almost convinced herself that it’s just her mind playing tricks on her, when someone’s breath ghosts along the column of her neck. They’re close, really close, and she hadn’t even heard them move-

More out of desperation and panic than the careful planning she had intended to use, Jo’s eyes shoot open and at the same time she flings her arm out, managing to grip the handle of the dagger.

She forces it upwards, desperately, and simply hits air. The advantage of surprise lost, her attacker jumps on her, trying to wrestle the knife away from their face, and out of her hands. They’re bigger than her, but not by much, but far stronger, and with a curse Jo loses the knife. “Help-” she begins to scream out an alarm, not that it would do much good considering how isolated she is from the rest of castle - Lady Stark had made sure of that -but a hand shuts itself over her mouth before she can say anymore.

She screams again, but it’s pitiful through the effective gag of the intruder’s hand, and tries another approach, raising her knee sharply - this time her hit landing and her assumption that her attacker was male coming to fruition as they let out a curse of their own, their hands slackening. Not to be accused of wasting an opportunity, Jo takes advantage and wriggles from under them, running to where she knows the door to be and bursting out of her chambers, heart pumping as hard as it ever has, bare feet smacking against the cold stone floor, her thick, curly hair beating against her back.

She needs to get to the other side of the castle, or at least to the servant quarters, but really she needs to get to father or Robb or Ser Rodrik or even Theon, for gods sake, anyone with a weapon and the knowledge to use it effectively-

A sharp, searing pain bursts in Jo’s calf, and she lets out a shout of pain, crumpling to the floor, the air knocked out of her. She looks back and sees a tall, redheaded youth striding arrogantly toward her, a bow in his hand with an arrow knocked. The same kind of arrow that is embedded in her leg.

“Bastard,” she curses him, and tries to rise, because it’s just an arrow, and father said all archers were cowards, it can’t be that bad-

She lets out a pained groan as her leg gives way again.

“I thought that was you?” the boy asks, grinning down at her smugly. He has a queer accent, and he sounds older than he looks. She barely bristles at the insult as she usually would. There’s no point screaming for help - no one would hear. As he draws closer, she sees a few freckles dotting his pale cheeks.

“What do you _want?”_ she growls. The boy retracts his arrow when he sees _no, she really is_ not _going anywhere_ and gives her a long look. Then, he gets down on his haunches, without breaking eye contact.

“You, of course.” he says, and Jo would have tried standing and running again, or hitting him, or _something,_ no matter how hopeless it would be, but that’s the moment when he rips the arrow out of her leg with no warning and she screams in pain instead, and is soon lost to darkness.

**...**

Jo comes to far colder than she was when she lost consciousness.

She takes a moment to come to, cataloguing a bitterness in the back of her throat, and the goosebumps standing to attention on her skin. When her vision adjusts, she finds herself in a clearing, where even though the summer snows have been falling recently, the ground is green and mossy. It’s closed in, and no wind gets through the trees. Two horses are tied to two trees, leisurely eating oats. In other circumstances, Jo would call it peaceful.

What ruins the illusion of tranquillity is a roaring fire in the middle, with a flame haired boy huddled by it. Illuminated he looks like a tongue of fire himself, hair auburn and body lean, long and tinted slightly golden by the hearth he sits by.

“Where are we?” she croaks out, pushing herself up from the ground to a sitting position. She numbly sees her feet are tied together, and she isn’t wearing the clothes she was when she collapsed. These aren’t her clothes at all, in fact, she’s wearing thick breeches and tunic, and hard sturdy boots that look a little too big. “Where have you taken me?”

He smiles at her cheekily, and she wants to wipe that smirk off his smug face “G’morning princess.”

“Don’t call me that,” she snaps.

“Sorry cub.”

“Just- shut up!”

“Well then, I won’t be able to tell you where we are then, will I?” Jo presses her lips together at that, and instead focuses on bum-shuffling towards the fire.

The boy takes pity on her “We’re about fifty leagues from the Wall.”

Jo blanches “The _Wall?_ Why would you want to go _there?”_ In her head she thinks desperately that her father’s search parties wouldn’t go this far north. If he sent any search parties at all.

The boy just looks at her, with a raised eyebrow. And, finally, she gets it.

“You’re a wildling.” she says, trying to keep her voice even.

“Aye, Joanna Snow, that I am. But we prefer to call ourselves the Free Folk.”

“How do you know my name?” Jo accuses, eyes narrowed.

“Even Beyond-the-Wall, we know of the Starks. We know of your crow uncle. We know of you.”

“Why?” she asks next, after a ten minute silence of the boy skinning rabbits and putting them on spits as the sun rises higher in the sky.

“I wanted you, so I stole you.” he says.

“Rubbish.” she spits back “You don’t come a hundred leagues just to steal a girl you’ve never seen before. What did you want at Winterfell?”

For the first time, he looks at her with something almost like respect in his flint-like blue eyes “You’re a sharp one, aren’t ya?”

She raises an eyebrow, showing she won’t be dissuaded. “Fine, lass, you weren’t the only reason I went. But you were the main one. I was also doing a bit of spywork as it were for Mance.”

“Mance- Mance _Rayder?”_ she says, aware of how impossibly wide her eyes must be right now. The King-Beyond-the-Wall was a mythical figure to those that lived in the North, and a non-existent one to those who resided in the South.

“He t’was going to come hisself, but his wife got pregnant and he didn’t want to leave her. So I got sent.” The boy explains, before taking a look at her face and laughing - a boisterous, pleasant sound. Kidnappers shouldn’t have nice laughs. “And I got to steal myself a pretty southron wife as well.”

“I’m not southron.” she says, confused now. She’s never even set foot in the South.

“You’re a southroner to me, lass.” he tells her “Beyond-the-Wall is north of everyone and everything - you’re a southroner to us free folk.”

“I suppose it’s where you’re standing.” she says mainly to herself, but he nods at her encouragingly.

“And,” she adds, just so he doesn’t get the ridiculous idea that she’s warming up to him in his head “you can’t steal women and then call them your wife.”

At that, he has a full belly laugh. Jo feels her cheeks heat up despite herself. “You’d better tell that to the rest of the free folk then - we’ve been doing it for a long time.”

“But- but that’s barbaric! What if the girl doesn’t want to marry you?”

He raises a thick eyebrow at that “Then she’d better get good at fightin’.”

“I didn’t want you to steal me, it’s not my fault nobody let me learn how to fight.” She remembers being bitter for years that Robb, Theon and then Bran got to learn how to fight and she didn’t, instead being forced to sew and recite the names of great houses. Arya had felt much the same, but their father had never relented. She had occasionally bashed sticks with Robb in the godswood, but for some reason Robb got the silly idea in his head that it was unchivalrous to hit a lady - despite Jo telling him she was most definitely not a lady - and had always let her win, so it stopped being fun.

He looks her up and down across the fire “I could teach you, if you like.”

Jo swallows, lost for words again. She’s never been good at them, but her abductor seems to have plenty to spare. Changing the subject, and trying not to think about how long she’s wanted to know how to fight, she asks “What’s your name, anyway? I should know the name of my abductor.”

“Husband, lass.” he says “My name’s Yves.”

“I’ve never heard that name.”

“And I’ve never heard of a Joanna neither. Guess we’ll both have to learn.”

**...**

In the end, Jo is not granted the other horse, as that’s for the climbing equipment. Because Yves seems to think they’re going to climb the Wall.

“That’s how I got over,” he tells her jauntily, from the front of the horse. Her feet are untied but her hand are now secured firmly round his waist, which doesn’t let her even entertain the notion of running, and she is very aware she is stuck to his back like super glue.

Jo has, in the past few days as they've stopped at night in various caves and clearings, unhelpfully become rather used to Yves' constant chatting about everything and anything, and even kind of likes it.  
  
He's never silent, because he's so full of stories and tales and songs, and Jo wonders how all of it fits inside of him.   
  
At night, he insists they huddle together, and more often than not she wakes with something hard digging into her back. Septa Mordane had only explained coupling once, and said it was painful, and you mustn't do it with anyone other than your husband. It scares Jo a little.  
  
But he never pushes, never even suggests her doing anything, simply walking away from her when he wakes and when he comes back he's normal again.   
  
At first she's grateful. Then she gets slightly insulted, even though she knows if she were to lay with him she'd be ruined forever.  
  
( _Ruined for what? A life of a spinster? No one wants to marry a bastard_ , the treacherous little voice inside her head mutters resentfully.)  
  
They reach the Wall on the third day after Jo wakes. The journey should have taken six days in all, but it only took one because Yves explains he rode hard through the night to get away from Winterfell, covering half of the journey in half the time.  
  
Although Jo’s Uncle Benjen has been a man of the Night’s Watch for as long as Jo has lived, she’s never seen the famous structure before. It’s impossibly high, and impossibly long, and appears to be made purely of ice.  
  
“It’s beautiful.” She breathes.  
  
Yves looks at her with an unfathomable expression “I suppose it depends on where you’re standing.”  


**...**

Robb doesn't quite know which part of his brain thinks that it's perfectly reasonable to punch a wall, but he knows about three seconds after punching said wall that it was wrong.   
  
He watched with detached fascination as the blood ran over his knuckles.   
  
They hadn't found Jo. They didn't think they'd ever find Jo.  
  
Robb felt his breakfast moving turbulently in his stomach, as he thought of what the herald had said "Lord Stark, yer daughter has been taken by a Wildling most likely. They're prob'ly way away."  
  
His mother has come over to him, and fussed over the ripped skin of his fist, but Robb could barely even sense her, his mind on a demented loop of _probably way away,_ and _taken by a Wildling._

His lord father’s face is a thundercloud “Nevertheless, keep up the search.”

The herald bows clumsily “Yes, m’lord.”

Robb has to take solace in the fact his father isn’t giving up. He has to, or he’ll go mad.

He can’t even remember the last thing he said to her.

**...**

As beautiful as the Wall is, Jo doesn’t feel quite so appreciative half way up it.

She and Yves are tied together, and he’s above her, and she knows she needs to keep up, she knows goddamnit, but the Wall’s slippery and freezing and her insides are so cold, she doesn’t want to be here, she didn’t want to be stolen, she just wants to go home, she wants to see Robb and Arya and Bran, she wants to see her father, she wants to fall away from this icy cliff-

But falling won’t let her go home. Falling will make her dead.

It’s a clear day, with no wind to speak of, and Jo thinks that’s the only reason she hasn’t tumbled to her death yet. Her teeth chatter, and her hands shake, but she keeps climbing upwards. Towards safety. Towards the point of no return.

Towards Yves.

**...**

They winch themselves down the other side, which is easier than the journey up. Yves looks rattled as well - he had almost lost his footing twice, and had barely managed to cling onto the Wall on both occasions. His bow was lost, but he shouted that it was better the bow than the spare furs.

When they get down, they just stand for a moment, breathing heavily and leaning into each other heavily. She can feel his lungs expanding as he breathes, and she realizes she can’t remember the last time she was this close to another person - so close she could feel his heart beat slowing down.

Yves has finally run out of things to say.

A hand, cold, curls around her own. Yves isn’t looking at her; his gaze is focused solely on his icy homeland, but his grip tightens and reflexively, Jo squeezes right back.

Suddenly, she feels less alone. She has Yves, and if he’s right about the Wilding marriage custom, she’ll always have him. It shouldn’t be a comforting thought, that you’ll spend the rest of your life with your kidnapper if he has his way, but it is.

Yves finally clears his throat “C’mon,” he says, roughly “we’ve got to make a move if we’re going to find somewhere safe to rest before nightfall.”

He doesn’t let go of her hand until they find a cave to settle into for the night. Jo tells herself she hasn’t pulled away yet because she’s cold.

**...**

The next morning Yves is in high spirits “Not far to Mance’s camp now, only a week or so now.”

“Will they-” Jo doesn’t really know how to properly phrase her question without offending Yves “Will they hate me? Because of my father? Because I’m from the other side of the Wall?”

Yves looks at her from under his curly, red hair like he’d genuinely not considered it “You’re not a silly little princess like I first thought, I’m sure you’ll make ‘em like you in no time.”

This of course translated to _they’ll hate you until you prove yourself._

Jo groaned. She had had a lifetime of being judged because of her parentage, she wasn’t looking forward to going through another round.

“Aw, it won’t be that bad, lass. I’ll be there to protect ya!” Yves says, slinging an arm around her shoulder. Without thinking, Jo pushes him off so he staggers back into the snow, landing on his arse, with his legs in the air.

Unable to help it, Jo laughs.

Struggling upright, Yves shakes himself like a wet dog, before jumping up and down to dislodge all the snow from his clothes “Oh, you done it now, Snow!”

He bends down, gathering some snow into his hand. Jo begins to run, but it hits her in the back of the head. She shrieks, before releasing her own ammunition, which hits him in the side. “You’re finished!” she yells.

Genuinely, she doesn’t know how long they had played in the snow, but soon the sun begun to set far sooner than she thought it should have, and they trudged back to the cave they had slept in the night before, furs sopping wet.

When Yves begins to strip, she genuinely doesn’t think anything of it. They’ve been in close quarters for weeks now, and while he changes in front of her, she usually has a tree to huddle behind, trying to scrape together the modesty that has abandoned her.

It’s only when Yves looks questioningly at her, she realizes she’s shaking and her teeth are chattering, the cave is small and has no hiding places, and the wind is howling outside.

Jo blushes furiously, but knows there isn’t another option.

“Turn around,” she grits out, and Yves gives her a jaunty wave as he pulls on his dry furs before spinning. She also turns her back on him, trying to find some relief in the fact she can’t see him.

She slides off her top first, and shivers harder as the cool air hits her damp skin. She rubs her torso hard, trying to warm herself up with the friction. Jo then shrugs off her sodden trousers too, and bends down to rub her calves.

A whistle comes from behind her, and she spins around with a gasp to see Yves still facing the opposite wall, shoulders shaking with laughter.

“Bastard,” she mutters, as she pulls on her own spare clothes.

“Takes one to know one.” he quips back, voice echoing slightly.

**...**

The wind turns into a gale, which turns into a snowstorm. Neither she nor Yves is stupid enough to think they could get anywhere in that weather, so they huddle around the fire until it passes.

Their clothes dry out overnight so soon they can use them as bedrolls, and lose track of the days. Yves appears to have finally run out of patience, and has decided to ask her straight about her life.

“It’s only fair,” he says “I’ve told you everything about me, and I didn’t lie. I won’t ever lie to you.”

“I didn’t ask,” she reminds him, but her cheeks heat irrationally at his promise of truth, forever. She thinks she would have asked him even if he hadn’t offered the information, eventually.  

And she’s glad she knows now, about his mother with her own kissed by fire hair, about his father who died before he was born, about his two sisters and four brothers, about being the only one with his mother’s hair. About the rangers from the Night’s Watch who broke into their village, and put them all to the sword, his sisters barely managing to spirit him, the youngest, out of the village in time. _Lucky._ Ever since he’s been with Mance, even before he was the King-Beyond-the-Wall. He even tells her about old lovers - she’s almost embarrassed she has no experience whatsoever, because he tells it like every single time was better than the last - and the way each of them tugged on his hair after, so it would give them luck.

“Well I am, so tough.” he says, before laughing. He’s always laughing, just like Theon, but it’s less hateful. Jo finds she prefers it. “Tell me about your family.” he asks first.

“My father is wonderful.” she tells him, and sees him smile, maybe because of the fondness in her voice “He’s everything I’ve ever wanted to be. Fair, and just, and honourable, and powerful and kind. I couldn’t wish for a better father.”

“Go on,” Yves sighs, eyes closing, the firelight flickering across his eyelids “I’m listening.”

“My brother Robb is the heir to Winterfell - he’s good at jousting, but that isn’t practiced in the North. He’s good at fighting too, he’s better than Theon but not as good as Jory yet - Jory’s the captain of the guard. We used to be closer when we were younger, but I was a girl and he was a boy and when we were five he got Theon.”

Yves is breathing deeply now, and his skin, although smeared with dirt, is youthful, and Jo is surprised by how beautiful he looks. She supposes he’s fallen asleep, but it’s almost therapeutic, talking about her family, even though she’ll never see them again, most likely.

“Arya is my little sister,” she tells him slowly, her own eyelids beginning to feel heavy now “she’s wild and wonderful, and I think she’d be better as a wildling than a lady. I love her so much...”

“I’m sorry.” Yves mumbles, not asleep after all. His mouth is turned down at the edges, but his eyes are still closed.

Jo thinks of Robb loving her but not listening to her, she thinks of her father looking at all his trueborn children different to how he looks at her, she thinks of Lady Stark’s glares and Septa Mordane’s scoldings and Sansa turning up her pretty little nose up at her bastard sister. She thinks of Ghost, the albino direwolf close to death who she’d never see grow up, she thought of Rickon calling her Arya and never Jo, she thought of Arya telling her _let’s run away together, me and you_ with tears in her eyesand Bran waving to her from the top of high buildings, but never talking to her when he was down on the ground. She thinks of the way Uncle Benjen once called her Lyanna, and lost all the colour in his face. She thinks of Theon telling her that she had better just go to the whorehouse now, because nobody would want to marry the bastard.

“Don’t be,” she says, and makes her decision.

She’s never going back.

**...**

It takes three days for the snowstorm to clear in the end, and in that time Yves makes himself a new bow and Jo makes the arrows. Yves promises to teach her how to fight with a sword and a dagger and how to shoot a man through the heart, how to carve animal bones and skin their pelts.

Jo can’t really believe it’s happening, and how happy she is about it all. Ever since she’s realized she’s happier here, in the wilderness, with a man she barely knows, than in Winterfell with her family and servants and a roaring fire every night, she’s felt freer than ever before.

Two days before they arrive at Mance’s camp, Yves stops calling her _lass_ and starts calling her _lover_ , even though they never even kissed.

One day before they arrive in Mance’s camp, Yves rights that.

**...**

Yves strolls right up to Mance’s tent, the biggest one in the centre of the camp, and walks right in without so much as announcing himself, his hand clasped in Jo’s so she can’t do anything but follow.

It’s warm inside the tent, which looks like it’s made out of the carcass of a mammoth, which yes, Yves had patiently explained to her, are real. There’s several people inside the tent, one man sat down and strumming on a lyre, another warming his hands over a fire, another kissing a beautiful blonde woman in the corner, and the final woman watching the lyre player with rapt attention, one hand cocooning her bulging, obviously pregnant, stomach.

For a moment, the scene is uninterrupted, before the huge man warming his hands looks up and bellows out Yves’ name. For the next minute, everyone in the tent gets up and embraces her - abductor? lover? husband? - before settling down.

Then the eyes flick to her.

“And this is your Stark wife then, is it?” the large man says, loud enough to make Jo wince if she hadn’t been expecting it, “Well, she’s a pretty one.”

Jo flushes at that, and smiles at him tightly, aware it probably came out more like a grimace.

“Oh, Yves, are we not good enough for you?” the stunning blonde woman says with a pout. Jo is slightly taken aback by her beauty, magnified by her chiming voice “Had to go over to the kneelers to find a wife you fancied?”

Yves gives her a cocky grin snaking a hand around Jo’s waist. Jo can’t contain her smile at the embrace, no matter how self conscious and tongue tied she feels. “I’d say I’m pretty happy, yeah.” Then, to Jo’s shock he kisses her right there and then - not a proper, heavy kiss at least, but still hard and quick and leaving Jo even more flustered.

Jo elbows him in the ribs, which just makes him grin harder.

“We’ve been terribly rude,” the lyre player says suddenly “allow me to introduce myself. My name’s Mance Rayder.”

Jo’s eyebrows rise slightly, before she gives a slight curtsey, years of training to show deference prompting her reaction, despite Yves’ jibes about how she wasn’t a kneeler anymore. When she realized what she did, she straightened up immediately-

“Sorry-“ she began to say, but it was the pregnant woman, who must have been Dalla, Mance’s wife who up until this point had been silence who spoke.

“Don’t be, I think deep down he likes it. Too many years as a crow. But you aren’t a kneeler no more girl - you’re free.”

And, so she was.

**...**

The first time she kisses Yves, and not just him kissing her, it quickly turns into something more.

They struggle into some cave, not even hearing the hoots and whistles of the other free folk, before dropping their furs as quick as they can, a desperation backing their movements, and in-between their fumbling fingers they keep on kissing, as if telling the other _I’m still here, I’m still interested, I’m still yours,_ until finally, finally, they’re both naked and curved around one another, bare skin slicked and pupils blown.

Yves pushes her down, oh so gently, and that’s when, that’s when he-

Jo thinks that sex is possibly the greatest thing ever. So they did it again.

And again.

And again.

It finally ended with both of them circling each other in one of the hot pools, Jo warmer than she has been in weeks, hands intertwined below the steaming water.

“I don’t ever want to leave this cave, Jo.” Yves says to her, in a whisper, like he’s not allowed to be happy, not allowed to love her, like it makes him weak. In response, Jo winds her arm around the back of his neck, and pulls him close for another kiss.

“Let’s stay longer then, lover.” she says against his lips. She feels his smile, even if she’s too close to see it.

**...**

Even though Val was taller than her, the older girl (Jo still had a difficult time not thinking of her as a princess) managed to find some proper, warm wildling furs for Jo to wear, as well as doing Jo’s hair in the wildling way, with two braids meeting at the back of her head, the rest of her curly hair allowed to fall down her back. At Winterfell she had to have it up at all times, or risk bringing even more dishonour to her father by having a ragged appearance.

It felt strange, and Jo couldn’t see herself, but when Yves saw her he grinned and swept her up into an embrace, calling her beautiful. In the days she spent it either learning how to fight with the other spearwives or carving out weapons. In the evenings she and Yves went to campfires and tumbled back to their tent drunk and loving.

In the morning she and Dalla brewed tansy tea, and spread it around the camp for those that wanted it. Jo took some herself most days, and winced at the taste.

She was happy.

**...**

More people began disappearing.

It wasn’t noticeable at first - they lost a fair few each week to cold and hunting, and with such a colossal number of free folk, it was easy for some to fall through the cracks.

But then, all of a sudden, it became noticeable.

Whispers, and then outright conversations, about the old enemy, the only enemy, the sleepers awakening. One night, after a war council, Yves stumbles in their bed drawn, pale and afraid, and doesn’t speak a word all night, simply clinging to her like a man would cling to everything he had ever loved, stroking her hair and burrowing his head in the crook of her shoulder.

It’s when the Cave Dwellers finally join the army people know there’s something really wrong. The Cave Dwellers are infamously antisocial and wary of all people who are not their own. For them to willingly join the army, it means something big is going down.

“Do you know what’s going on?” she finally confronts Val, her fastest friend in the camp, as they do their ritual of doing each other’s hair in Val and Qarl’s tent.

Val sighs as Jo does the final twist in her hair “Yes. Dalla told me.”

“Please, Val, Yves won’t tell me anything. He’s being so secretive... and _male_.” She groans, waving her hand about for the right word that eludes her. Val laughs, before her face becomes grim again.

“It’s only because he wants to protect you.” Val reminds her, and Jo sighs “He probably wants you to spare you the worry.”

“I think I’ll live.” Jo says drily, leaning her head back as Val begins to divide her black curls into sections “There’s not really anything that could shock me anymore after giants.”

It was still a famous day, the first time Jo had seen a giant. She had let out a little scream, jumped before staring at it slack jawed as it passed by. Yves still hadn’t stopped teasing her.

Val looks down at her hands “The Others.”

And suddenly, Jo understands with terrible clarity.

**...**

She goes furiously through the camp, peeling her eyes for a mop of red hair, anger thrumming in her veins. The gods are with her, as she finds him within half an hour, and considering the vastness of the camp, that’s exceptionally quick.

“You!” she screams. Yves turns, paling drastically as he sees his wife’s expression “Why did you not tell me?”

Yves takes a step back “Tell y-you what, lover?” he says, in a surprisingly calm voice, only stuttering slightly.

She looks at him, with an eyebrow raised, before crossing her arms.

“Can we-” Yves says, after he finally breaks “can we talk about this somewhere else?”

 _Yes_ , says the rational, calm part of Jo’s brain says. _No need to scare people._

She gives a curt nod, and they weave through the crowds before coming to a stop in front of Mance’s tent. She doesn’t even care. She’s so angry she can’t feel anything else; well, nothing except the scared, hurt core of her anger that she’s not focusing too much on.

They both step inside, the moment the skin falls back over the entrance she opens her hand and slaps him fully in the face, and as skin meets skin there’s a crack.

“How _dare_ you!” She shouts at him, a ball of rage and confusion “You promised me no secrets! You promised me! And you lied - you lied you bastard, how dare you think I wouldn’t find out? Just because I’m some stupid southroner that no one would say anything, no one would trust me? Just because _you-“_ she jabs a finger into his chest so they’re nose to nose before he takes an automatic step back “don’t trust me doesn’t mean others don’t, you arse! I trusted you, _I trusted you,_ and I have to find out about the single most important thing that could be happening from someone else? You bastard, you bastard, I’ll cut your cock off-”

She furiously tries to catch the tears that begin falling from her eyes, because she’s angry not upset, she’s not some weak woman like they all think, a soft, pathetic southroner with hands that smell like roses and a lifetime of warmth, she’s not, she’s better than crying her problems away, and when Yves takes a cautionary step towards her, with one cheek noticeably redder than the other, she pushes him away, but now her arms are betraying her too, shaking and weak and her wrists are caught in his hands.

“Let go of me!” she snarls, struggling, but Yves is unmoving, eyes never moving from her, slowly pulling her towards him. Tears are still sliding hot down her cheeks, and she can’t stop them. “Let go, let go, let go you bastard!”

“It wasn’t my choice,” he tells her through gritted teeth “I wanted to tell you, I did, I wanted to so badly.”

“Liar!” she screams, voice twisted from grief making her usually measured tones unrecognizable “Liar, liar, liar!”

Yves pulls her harshly towards him now, giving up on the gently, gently approach so their foreheads knock together but neither of them wince at the ache. His hands release her wrists but quickly attach themselves to each side of her head so she can’t look away.

“No, I’m not, I’m not a liar. I didn’t tell you because I was under orders, but I didn’t tell you it was something it wasn’t. I love you, Joanna. I love you, and it wasn’t my choice, and it just ended up this way. I love you, and I can’t stop, and if you left me, or gods forbid cut my cock off, it wouldn’t stop. I only wanted to keep you safe, honestly, Jo... lover... please...”

“I deserved to know.” she said thickly, all of the anger suddenly dropping out of her in a rush, leaving only the hurt behind “I deserved to know.”

“I know, I know.” Yves says, his eyes sliding shut as he realizes the danger has passed “I’ll tell Mance to go fuck himself in the future if he asks I not tell you anything, I promise.”

“Don’t promise.” Jo tells him wearily “You’re bad at promises.”

A flash of raw hurt arced across Yves’ face before it settled on his brow “I’m not, I’ll prove it to you, I will, I pr-”

Jo puts a finger over his lips before he can finish the word “You say it so often you forget what it means.”

“I don’t,” Yves shakes his head stubbornly “I don’t, Jo. I promise to love for as long as I am alive, I promise never to lie to you, I promise never to let you hurt if I can help it, I promise to protect you and-”

“Stop, Yves-” she tries to say but he carries on.

“I promise to hold you at night and teach you how to fight and how to skin mountain lions and show you the top of the Wall and-”

“You can’t keep these promises!” she cries, wrenching her hands free of his and burying her face in them “You can’t! Your words are very pretty but that doesn’t make them true-”

“I can and they’re true, every last one!” he says wildly, hair bristling like a living being on top of his head “I can and I will and I swear it, on my mother’s honour and my sister’s sacrifice and my cock, and everything else of value I have! All of it, you can have _all of it_!”

There’s a ringing silence after that, both of them slightly shocked by his declaration. Then, Jo steps up to him and raises a hand slowly to his now bruising cheek.

“Look what I did to you,” she breathes, afraid of shattering the delicate mood, hand trembling slightly “look at what I did to your face.”

“I’ll take it as a fair punishment.” Yves quips, a grin snaking his way onto his face.

It turns out, Mance and Dalla’s bed is far softer than their own.

**...**

The camp moves twice in a month, and Yves come back to their tent even paler after seemingly every meeting with Mance and the rest of the clan leaders. People are scared, really scared now. Rumours run rife throughout the camp, some of the more outlandish ones closest to the truth.

It won’t be long now until they all know.

“Take me with you,” Jo says once.

It’s half a challenge.

Yves looks like he’ll fight for a moment, before grinning toothily at her as he flops down on their makeshift bed (in fact a pile of furs) “Alright lover, I’ll take you to big bad wolf’s den.”

She cocks an eyebrow at that “ _I’m_ the big bad wolf, remember, dear?”

Yves smacks a hand against his forehead exaggeratedly “How could I forget?”

The meeting isn’t so much a meeting as a gathering of large free folk who can all shout exceptionally loudly shouting at each other and threatening to geld, mutilate and kill one another at the drop of a pin. Jo finds it mildly depressing that she’s completely used to it, and has felt the urge to threaten similar things to the leader of the Thenns who leers at her constantly.

It passes smoothly for about ten minutes, if that, before one of the clean leaders from the mountains narrows their eyes at her “What is the kneeler doing here?” he says, in a deep voice.

“I am no kneeler, ser.” she snaps back at him, chin raised slightly in defiance. Their eyes lock, neither blinking.

“Aye, is that so? All I see is a little girl playing at being a spearwife, a southroner playing at being a northerner. You aren’t one of us, girl. Why is she here?”

He directs this final question at Mance, who seems to be asking himself the same question, but Jo knows she needs to stand up for herself now, and can’t let anyone else do the talking for her.

“My ancestors were First Men, as were yours. The Others are the enemy of all of us, not just you and yours. I am one of you because I choose to be, because I never fit in the south-” it’s the first time she ever deliberately names her home as the south, and she doesn’t even realize until after “and I fit here. If you need ask again, I’ll show you the truth of my right to be here, and it will be fun for me. Not so much for you.”

She deliberately makes a show of fingering the sword she has taken to wearing around her belt. For a moment, she thinks he’s called her bluff, that they all have, it’s so quiet in the tent you could hear a pin drop-

The clan leader lets out a loud roar of laughter, breaking the silence, which is quickly echoed by the rest of the free folk in the tent.

The rest of the meeting passes as smoothly as a wildling meeting can pass - half the attendees are having arguments with one another about whose clan should get what land, the other half shitting themselves about the Others, as they should be.

As they exit, Yves whispers in her ear “Big bad wolf, indeed.”

**...**

Benjen is not sure what part of him decided it was a good idea to punch the wall of Lord Commander Mormont’s solar, but it was wrong.

“And this is certain?” he grits out, when he manages to get his tongue to work.

Jeor Mormont looks at him pityingly “I’m sorry, Benjen.”

Ben lets out a roar of anger and punches the wall again, like it will hurt less and bring his niece home.

Mormont swallows “I will leave you to your grief.”

Benjen doesn’t hear him exit, but he must have as the next time he looks away from the grey slabs of stone the room is empty but for him and Mormont’s raven.

“Not again,” he says to himself, his voice slurring slightly to his own ears, echoing against the walls or perhaps against his skull “Not again, dammit!”

He closes his eyes, and rests his head against the wall, all the energy gone from him. Behind his eyelids he sees Jo, and Lyanna. Sometimes they meld into one, their similarities painful.

“Why?” he says to himself again, but the bird answers.

“ _Queen, queen_ ,” it croaks, or maybe it was just saying “ _c_ _orn_.”


	2. 2.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Think I’m who?” Jo repeats, but for the second time, none of the crows answered her, simply staring at her, bug-eyed. After another thirty seconds of the staring match Jo rolled her eyes and left the tent, her fun lost.
> 
> Grenn blinked a few more times.
> 
> “Oh gods,” he repeated Edd’s earlier statement, mind flashing back to the long faced, grey eyed, dark haired man he had gone on a handful of rangings with “It really is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I DIDN'T THINK I'D GET THIS DONE BEFORE GCSEs, BUT THANKS TO LOVELY REVIEWS I GOT MYSELF OFF MY ASS AND GOT IT DONE! I'm sorry, I'm very proud of myself. Okay, now there'll be nothing for at least 2 months. But I am still proud of myself, and of this.

**_2 years later_ **

Catelyn Stark raised her hands and watched the blood run down her long fingers, over her wrists, beneath the sleeves of her gown. Slow red worms crawled along her arms and under her clothes.

She remembered blood like this before, in some broken part of her mind that suddenly began making noise, terrible noise ( _boomdoom, boomdoom_ ), the corridor outside the bastard’s room, trickles worming through the cracks in the paving stones, before turning to just a red river that disappeared when it hit the snow. _Blood. Blood. Robb. Sansa. Arya. Bran. Rickon. Blood. Blood._

 _Ned, Ned_ , she called for him. _All your babes gone now, all gone, all gone. All our sweet babes... all yours... all gone..._ The gods had known she had been pleased to find Joanna gone, her room a wreck, her blood streaked on the floor. They had seen the smile when she’d heard she was gone. They had heard her comforting Ned, saying at least it wasn’’t Arya or Sansa. They had been as disgusted with her as he had been, eyes of fire and blood. Blood. This was her penance. This was their punishment.

Did it hurt? Did it hurt the girl like this hurt her? So much hurt, her son’s body lay twisted at her feet, did it _hurt_ like this-

 _It tickles_. That made her laugh until she screamed. ‘‘Mad,’’ someone said, ‘‘she’s lost her wits,’’ and someone else said, ‘‘Make an end,’’ and a hand grabbed her scalp just as she’d done with Jinglebell, and she thought,  _No, don’t, don’t cut my hair, Ned loves my hair._

Then the steel was at her throat, and its bite was red and cold.

**...**

When Jo heard the horn go, she jumped to her feet from where she was carving an axe handle and rushed out of Mance’s tent, oblivious to Dalla, Mance and Val’s laughter from behind her. She received whistles from those she knew as she sprinted past them, and couldn’t even find a hint of annoyance.

She hadn’t seen Yves in three months.

As she reached the edge of the camp, she saw Rattleshirt approaching, at the front of a long line of the free folk who went out on the ranging.

Yves was, as always, given away by his hair.

She raised a hand in the air and waved it frantically, and gave a cry, drawing his attention. A wide, bright grin spread across his face to mirror her own, and for a moment they just smiled at each other, as Yves trekked towards her. When he got close enough, he broke away from the single file line, and opened his arms wide. She needed no more encouragement and rushed into his arms, letting out a shriek as he lifted her clean off the ground, wrapping her legs around his torso.

“I missed you,” she tells his hair, conversationally “I missed you so very much.”

“Meh,” he says, voice a little thick, muffled against where his face is pressed against her torso “I missed you a little.”

**...**

Yves and Jo, predictably, don’t go immediately to Mance, instead deciding to get reaccquianted, which is why they missed the excitement of the three crows giving up their vows.

“There’s the fat one, the sad one, and the bearded one.” Yves tells her later as they trek through the camp, arms laden high with firewood. “Fat one’s a coward, sad one’s determined to make everyone as miserable as he is, and the bearded one... I think you might like him. He’s... stubborn.”

“You like him,” she notes, smiling slightly at her husband out of the corner of her eye.

“I do,” Yves admits.

Jo puts down her bundle of wood in the hearth, before pretending to faint, catching herself at the last moment from completely falling into the snow, instead landing in a kneeling position. Yves eyes widen, breath shortening.

“Do you like him as much as you like me?”

Yves takes a step forward “If you really think that, then you know nothing Joanna Sno-ohh-gods-”

**...**

Jo first sees the crows when she comes into Mance’s tent for her and Val’s daily ritual, and comes across all three in their undergarments, or less.

It’s the fat one who notices her first, and when he does he lets out a squeak of surprise, his hands flashing down to cover his modesty as his round eyes bulge out of his flabby face. This alerts the other two to her presence, and they too spin round and quickly attempt to cover what’s left of their modesty.

She knows immediately which one the bearded one is, and exactly why Yves likes him - he’s strongly built, with a firm chest, slim hips and slightly curly hair.

“Who are you?” the sad one - whose skin seems to stick to his bones - demands, eyes squinted in suspicion “Why are you here?”

She smiles disarmingly at him, but it doesn’t lessen the suspicious look on his face. A sensible man. “Just looking for Val.”

“Well, she ain’t here.” The morose man snaps.

“I can see that.” Jo says, but doesn’t move towards the exit. Instead, she pulls one of Mance’s chairs up and sits down on it backwards, legs spread towards the crows.

The bearded one swallows thickly.

“We’re- changing.” The fat one tells her, bottom lip wobbling.

She smiles with all her teeth at that “I can see that, yes. Don’t take too long, or the frost’ll get you, even if you’re next to a fire.”

“ _Leave.”_ the sad one grits out. The fat one begins shaking. The bearded one breathes slowly, eyes never leaving her face.

“I don’t think I will.” she says, before putting an elbow on the back of the chair and resting her chin in her hand, making sure to rake her eyes up and down the body of the bearded one. “Carry on, or are the big bad crows afraid of a wildling?”

Slowly, oh so slowly, the bearded ones goes to turn and grab his trousers, and Jo feels a thrill of pleasure when-

“Wildling?” the fat ones says, quite suddenly. The fear seems to have deserted him, only curiosity remaining. It throws her a little, and does the same to the other two crows.

“What is it, Sam?” The beardy one says, thick eyebrows pulled together.

“Wildlings don’t call themselves wildlings.” The fa- Sam says, and quite suddenly the tables turn unexpectedly.

“I do.” she says, perhaps a bit too quickly, because now they all have that suspicious glint in their dark eyes.

“Oh gods,” the grumpy, thin man says at last “I think it’s her.”

**...**

It was well known in Castle Black that First Ranger Benjen Stark was a man on a mission. For two years, he had cut down his shorter rangings, instead delegating to his second, only deeming to go out on the longest, most dangerous missions that no one else wanted.

It was also well known why.

Two years before, his niece, Ned Stark’s bastard, had been stolen from her bed by most likely a wildling, and never recovered. The First Ranger had taken it especially hard; many whispered that it was because of the bastard’s shocking resemblance to his sister, Lyanna, who had also been kidnapped fourteen years before. Whispered, but never spoken aloud: if it was ever mentioned in the First Ranger’s hearing then a thundercloud would pass over his face and more often than not the offender would be on the night shift for weeks.

Once, Sam had heard the Lord Commander and Stark arguing, and guiltily spied the altercation through a keyhole.

“You gave up your family! I’m _sorry_ , Ben, but you are a Black Brother, first and foremost, now and always. You _cannot_ go after her. I forbid it. You are needed here too badly - you cannot help her where she is now.”

“Like you gave you up yours?” Benjen Stark snarled back, finger pointed accusingly at the Mormont’s Valyrian Steel Sword hung round the Lord Commander’s waist “I will give up on her when I am cold in the ground, and not before!”

“Well then,” Mormont bellowed “the way you are going, you will not have to wait long!”

There was a ringing silence, and footsteps went to the door, and Sam was about to leap out the way when Mormont spoke again, voice weary “She is not your sister, Benjen. Nothing will bring her back.”

A growl, that sounded more like it came from a wild animal than a human being came from just behind the wood, and Sam bustled out of the way just in time to avoid crashing into the First Ranger. Sam remembered the fierce look of determination on his face, the way his brows were pulled down tight in thought as he stormed away.

The older men, like Edd, said that before his niece’s disappearance, Benjen Stark had been a handsome man with a youthful face. Sam could scarcely imagine it.

The day after the altercation, Benjen Stark was discovered to have rode out in the night, into the land of Always Winter.

He had never returned.

...

“Think I’m who?” Jo repeats, but for the second time, none of the crows answered her, simply staring at her, bug-eyed. After another thirty seconds of the staring match Jo rolled her eyes and left the tent, her fun lost.

Grenn blinked a few more times.

“Oh gods,” he repeated Edd’s earlier statement, mind flashing back to the long faced, grey eyed, dark haired man he had gone on a handful of rangings with “It really is.”

**...**

Jo and Yves left Mance’s tent later than usual the next night, after being simultaneously detained and entertained by Tormund, who had spent a day trying to see what the crows knew about fighting.

“Pathetic, two of them! Har har!” he bellowed “Barely knew how to hold a bloody sword, let alone swing the thing. The fat one quaked the whole time, and I twas sure he’d start crying!”

“What about the third?” Mance asks suddenly, looking up from his lyre.

Tormund shrugged his broad shoulders “Not bad, that one, knows how to hold the thing and hack, but he’ll get tired quick. Nobody never taught him how to fight. If they’re all like them first two, the Wall is ours in a day! Har har!”

Jo noticed as the rest of them laughed along with Tormund, Mance looked contemplative.

As everyone began to file out, Mance gestured that she and Yves stay. It was just her, Mance, her husband and Dalla in the end, and the constantly busy tent suddenly felt larger than usual, and cold despite the fire crackling the centre.

“The third one - Grenn, I believe he’s called - I want you two to keep a close eye on him.” She and Yves both frown in confusion at the same moment “I don’t want a halfway decent fighter unsupervised - test his loyalties, if you can.”

“What should we say, for why we want to hang around him?” Jo asks.

“Say you want to help him improve his fighting,” Mance replies instantly “I’ve heard you’ve got good with that sword of yours, and Yves has always been a gifted archer.”

“Won’t that be making him a greater danger?” Yves asks, whilst flushing slightly under Mance’s praise.

“Not if you can make him loyal to us,” Dalla speaks for the first time, her melodious voice ringing through the tent “You two are many things, but subtle is not one of them.”

Jo and Yves exchange a guilty look.

“Got it.” Jo says, giving Mance and Dalla a grin “Keep an eye on him, teach him how to fight, fuck him.”

“That’s about it, yes,” Mance says, with a sigh. The King-Beyond-The-Wall’s baby son squealed from Dalla’s lap, and clapped.

As Jo and Yves left, Mance looked at the unnamed boy accusingly “You _would_ find this funny, wouldn’t you?”

**...**

The next day, Jo and Yves make towards where the crows have been staying with a purpose. None of them are fighting when they get there - the sad one, Sam and Grenn are all sitting to the side of the unofficial fighting arena, where two boys are hammering each other with blows from blunted swords, like the ones Robb and Theon used to use in Winterfell.

“Oi!” Yves calls out.

Grenn turns, as does Sam. “Not you,” Yves tells the fat lad and the sad one “Just the half decent one.”

“What d’you want?” Grenn asks, distrust clear in his body language. Jo can’t help but notice that while the sad one seems perfectly content to go back to watching the fight that Sam shrinks slightly at Yves’ harsh words, and something that feels suspiciously like guilt curls up in her chest.

“Wanna learn how to fight? You’ve got some promise, more so than the other two anyways, and we could always use more decent fighters.”

Grenn’s eyebrows pull down “I’m no marksman, and you’re no sword fighter.”

“True,” Jo steps in “But I am a sword fighter. Take it or leave it, crow.”

Grenn appears to war with himself for a moment before standing “C’mon Sam.” he says to the fat lad.

“You sure you want him around?” Yves says, his disdain for Sam clear in his tone “The only thing he’s likely to be good for is saving us from starvin’ when he dies.”

The fat boy shrinks again. Grenn looks like he’s about to open his mouth, but Jo gets there before him “What’s the harm?” She asks Yves “At best, he gets better. At worst, he’s entertainment.”

Yves shrugs “Suit yerself.” before turning and trekking to their own training area. Jo follows, but not before seeing relief blossom on Sam’s face.

**...**

When Grenn has been knocked on his ass six times out of six in a row sparring with the girl he now knows as Jo, he realizes he’s going to have to change his approach.

On the seventh try, he goes for her side first, instead of straight on. That time he gets knocked on his ass 2 seconds faster.

He groans from the ground. He hears the redheaded man laughing his annoying, contagious laugh from the side. Jo smiles down from above him, and he thinks fiercely for a moment that she must be using some kind of magic, because she looks like an enchantress to him, but not- not the bad kind.

But then he remembers she has the blood of a great house, even if she were a bastard, whereas he was just a boy from a farm in the Stormlands - she was better than him just by breathing, so it made sense she was also better by swinging a sword.

“How do you do that?” he puffs, as he gets up from the ground.

“Taking advantage of your weight,” she says “Every time your balance is compromised, you make yourself an easy target. Try not to move too quick unless it is absolutely necessary.”

He nods, and raises his sword again. As Jo comes for him, he hears a curse from behind him that sounds suspiciously like it comes from the redhead. He grins, and charges.

This time, it takes her five seconds more than it did before.

“Better,” she pants from above him, teeth like pearls as she grins “but you’re still dead. Again.”

**...**

So far Sam has almost hit two mammoths, three giants, six unfortunate animals and has nine wildlings, one of which is Yves who he had hit on four separate occasions.

Yves is just glad they’re not using real arrows.

Pretty much the only thing Sam had not hit so far was the target, which was still unmarked by any arrow that Sam had loosed. Yves really wondered why the Southerners thought they were so great sometimes - Wildings were good at many things because if they weren’t, they died. If you weren’t good at things in the South, you got fat, it appeared.

“Are you closing your eyes?” he asks, mostly in astonishment “Are you just praying to your pretend Gods and hoping?”

The chin and chin fat on the fat boy trembled “I’m sorry, I-”

Yves sighs, and runs a hand through his hair “Again.” He then purposefully steps behind the boy, so he isn’t in his range. He learned his lesson after the third hit.

From behind him Yves can hear Jo laughing, and turns to see Grenn once again on the ground.

She’s so beautiful, and Yves can’t quite believe she’s his.

A thwanging sound behind him and Sam lets out a crow of victory. Yves is loath to turn away from Jo, but forces himself to with some restraint he did not like exercising often.

The arrow was embedded in the target, at the edge.

Yves blinked in surprise, before looking over at Sam who was beaming. Spurred on by Jo’s laughter behind him and the fact that perhaps the fat boy wasn’t entirely useless, Yves smiled.

“Well done,” he tells Sam, who looks taken aback by the praise, and then exceptionally pleased “And again.”

**...**

“I’m exhausted.” Jo tells Yves.

“You’re telling me,” he huffs back. They lie there on their bed for a moment before looking at one another out the corner of their eyes.

“Shall we?” she asks.

“I thought you were exhausted,” Yves tuts.

“Oh, well then,” she says, moving to pull away but Yves hands clamp around her. She laughs as he digs his fingers into her sides, and kicks her legs.

“Not so fast,” he hums against her ear, and she can hear the smile in his voice “I’m not quite done with you yet.”

**...**

Yves and Jo are put with Orell, the warg, Tormund and all three crows as a scouting party to send across the Wall, along with the Magnar of Thenn and Jarl, Val’s beau.

“We have to climb that bloody thing again?” Jo hisses in Yves ear, and sees he looks even less pleased by the prospect than her. She remembered the last time they had scaled the wall - two strangers, one of which was overconfident and the other more than unenthusiastic, but by the time they had finished both had never wanted to brave it again.

Jo remembered how painful the numbness of her fingers had gotten, and resolved to bring her best gloves, and her second and third best just in case. Yves wound his fingers in hers in an attempt to be reassuring, but it didn’t really work. Jo appreciated the gesture all the same, however.

“We’ll fall!” Edd, they have learned the morose one’s name at last, cries. “Have you seen how tall the bloody thing is?”

Tormund lets out one of his bellowing chuckles “Best not let go, then.”

 _Falling won’t get you anything but dead,_ she reminds herself, a strong sense of déjà-vu washing over her as she thinks of the climb. Tormund and the Magnar and even Yves just become flies buzzing in her ears, and she’s transported back.

Don’t fall. She’s come so far. Gotten so high. She can’t fall now, not after everything.

“Become a Black Brother, they said,” she hears Edd grumble to himself “It’ll be fun, they said.”

She can’t contain her laughter at that, and somehow he actually manages to make her feel better, though it clearly wasn’t his intention.

**...**

“You looking at my ass, lover?” Yves bellows down the Wall, two men in front of her, and it’s half a miracle she hears.

Jarl and his group were dead, and they were experienced, having been up and down the Wall over a dozen times, each of them. It had shaken them all, but Jo comforted herself with the knowledge she didn’t have to forge her own path this time - Grigg the Goat’s party had cleared the way and let down ropes - they’d be fine, Jo tells herself.

A scream comes from above. A moment later a body hurtles past Jo, and doesn’t catch her, but almost does and her heart goes into overdrive.

It was Orell, the warg, and Jo couldn’t help the guilty joy that filled her when she realized that it hadn’t been Yves.

Above her, Yves stopped, face white and eyes wide, forcing her to stop as well, and the two men in front.

“Keep going!” she shouted. But this time he couldn’t hear her, and stayed stock still. “Yves!” she tried again _“Move!”_

As quick as the joy had come it deserted her, leaving her only with terror. If Yves didn’t move, she couldn’t move, and neither could any of the Thenns behind her or the two crows in front. Their fingers would go numb, and sooner or later they’d fall.

If they fell, they’d die.

“ _MOVE!”_ she screams again, throat burning, but Yves didn’t react. Below her the Thenn’s voices, indistinguishable, seemed to have caught on and began shouting the same thing, all of them realizing the very real, sudden danger.

Yves didn’t seem to hear them.

One of the crows, the fat one, Sam, began shuffling up the rope. He would unbalance the whole thing, strain the rope too much. Jo went to shout again, but her words caught in her throat and she couldn’t make a sound, terror ruling her body.

They’d fall. They’d fall. They’d die.

Sam reached Yves and hit him in the back of the calf. It clearly wasn’t a hard hit, but Yves jumped like he’d been shocked by eels. For one terrible moment, Jo thought he’d lose his grip on the rope in his confusion, but his hands stayed sure.

He looked around, and blinked like he had forgotten where he was. Frost was beginning to seep inside Jo’s gloves, they had been immobile only a couple of minutes at the most, but much longer and the cold would kill them, before the fall.

They’d fall. They’d fall.

“MOVE!” Sam yells, louder than she has ever heard him before. Yves doesn’t even seem to know what he’s doing before he’s scuttling up the rope to obey. The rest of the climb is long and cold and terrifying, but they don’t fall.

**...**

When Jo finally reaches the top, she collapses on the ice and her lungs seem to deflate and inflate far too quickly, and she rubs her cold face until she can feel it again. Then, she drags herself away from the rope so the Thenn after her can clamber up, and staggers to her feet.

The air is harsh and pure, and feels like some kind of salvation down her throat.

She won’t fall now.

She sees Yves after scanning the area on instinct for him, he’s curled up in a ball, away from everyone else, his knees tucked under his chin, shaking like anything. As she makes for him, she can see tear tracks on his cheeks.

“It was trying t’ shake me off,” He shivers as he speaks, and his hands around hers are like ice, hard and unyielding and freezing, “It was trying to kill me. It knew what I was.”

“It’s made of ice-” Jo begins trying to comfort him, but he shakes his head hard at her words, and screws his eyes tight shut.

“No, no, this wall is made o’blood.”

**...**

Grenn knows there’s something wrong with Yves, but also knows the wilding wouldn’t appreciate his interference.

He knows he’s become fond of the wildlings - he’s began to view them as friends, and then feels horribly guilty as he thinks of Qhorin Halfhand’s sacrifice, his sword through the brave man’s chest - but he can’t help it.

They’re people. It had been so easy just to turn them into monsters when he hadn’t lived amongst them, eaten their food, slept by their sides, but they weren’t. They had songs and names for the stars, they had fighting styles and forges and mothers and hunters and love.

Jo isn’t a wildling, he tells himself, not really. It’s not as bad. Is it? But Yves is, and a man and-

Grenn isn’t sure how he’s gotten this confused.

He knows he can’t, because of his vows, because the two are already together, because it is an abomination in the eyes of the Seven - both men being intimate with one another and polygamy, look what happened to the Targaryens-

Grenn needs to stop thinking so much - he was as slow and stupid as an aurochs, just like Ser Allister said. But, Jo said he was good. That he had good instincts.

He should really stop thinking so much about Jo. And Yves.

Determined not to think of them, Grenn treks through the north with the rest of the wildlings, until his feet have blisters and his head and back ache, and the snow begins to thin until four hours after they started their journey from the Wall, they’re walking on grass, and through the clouds the sun begins to shine.

It’s still cold - the kind of cold that Grenn, the farmer boy from the Stormlands, couldn’t have even began to imagine, but that’s the way the North is, and Grenn the Ranger, Grenn the traitor, Grenn the wilding, hasn’t felt such a low temperature in months, even though the wind is still cutting his cheeks. Some of the wildings, the ones who have never been so far south as the Wall, let alone leagues below it, start running on the grass, touching it, dipping their fingers in springs where the water isn’t frozen, like it is Beyond-The-Wall.

Sensing that they’re all tired and excited by the suddenly visible land, the Magnar orders they stop for the night. Sam is the last to reach their camp - he’s at the back of the train with Jo and Yves who also had slipped back, and between the three of them Jo is the only one who looks remotely alright.

Sam collapses on a log close to the fire, and his entire body heaves with his gasping breaths. A few jeers rise from the wildlings, but nowhere near as many as there would have been even the day before, half of the remaining men owing their lives to him, considering he managed to get Yves moving up the side of the Wall again.

Yves. Yves is not as pale as he was before, and seems to be moving normally again, but there’s a haunted look in his eyes that too many men on the Wall have. His hands have stopped shaking madly, at least, there’s only little tremors now.

And Jo- Grenn looked round for his female friend - were they friends? - but couldn’t see her dark silhouette anywhere. He spends another couple of minutes scanning the area for her, but still can’t find her. Concern wells up in his throat. No tents were up yet, so she couldn’t be hidden, unless-

He looked warily at the foliage surrounding the clearing they were in.

She wouldn’t have-

Suddenly, he realizes what she must be doing, in a camp full of men. He hadn’t thought how inconvenient it must be for Jo to do her business. Face bright red, he sat near Sam and waited for her return.

Grenn waited five minutes. Then ten. By the time twenty minutes had passed, he knew something was badly wrong. None of his sisters took any longer than three minutes to...go. It had to be something else.

Yves was still sitting by the fireplace, carving new arrows. He had a look of fierce concentration on his face, and his knuckles were white as he worked.

It was probably nothing, Grenn decided. He really didn’t want to bother Yves right now considering how on edge the other man was, or panic him unnecessarily.

Grenn would go look for Jo himself, he decided.

If he couldn’t find her, then he’d raise the alarm.

He slipped away from the fire unnoticed, as the wildings were occupied with either work or stories about the kneelers, and took a deep breath before stepping into the dark forest.

**...**

Jo realizes it was probably quite stupid to go for a walk about five minutes after she had set out, but she couldn’t help it.

These were her lands, her father’s lands, and there was a call in her heart and a howl echoing in her ears that told her she had to escape from the camp, from the thick smoke of the fire and the crease between Yves’ eyebrows.

He was prideful, and so was she, which was probably why they were so well matched, but in times like this she couldn’t stand him, couldn’t stand his embarrassment and shame over needing help from her.

The woods were lovely, dark and deep, but soon they were so quiet she didn’t know which way to turn to return to camp, guided only by the sliver of moon in the sky.

She heard another howl, this time not just in her head, and her mouth went dry. She could see her breath coming out in quick, little gasps against her will.

 _A man can only be brave when he is afraid,_ her father’s voice rang in her head, and she forced herself to straighten up.

A twig snapped behind her.

She span, heart thumping madly in her chest-

Out of the trees, came a huge wolf. The fur was as white as snow, the eyes as red as blood and even as its mouth opened, showing off all its teeth, not a sound emerged.

“Ghost?” Jo breathed.

**...**

Sam notices that Yves is becoming restless not as quickly as he should have. He chalked his hands beginning to shake again to stress, the little flinches from the Wall and the noises of animals in the night, the eyes tracking their group like a wounded animal just paranoia.

When he begins to pace, Sam can’t ignore it any longer.

“Yves?” he asks “What are you doing?”

Yves ignores him, and only answers when Sam asks again, louder this time.

“Have you seen Jo?” he snaps, running a hand over his chin, clenching and unclenching his fist.

Sam is about to say yes, yes of course he’s seen Jo, before he realizes suddenly he hasn’t, not since they arrived. “Perhaps she went to bed?”

Yves shakes his head stubbornly, motioning with his head to a bundle behind the log he had been perched on minutes before “I’ve got our tent.” Yves begins to chew worriedly on his nails.

“She-she can’t have gone _far.”_ Sam blusters, and in reply Yves sends him a withering look that Sam is sure makes his heart skip several beats.

After half an hour, checking every inch of the very small clearing, invading every tent and getting several things thrown at their heads, Yves and Sam realize that yes, Jo probably could have gone far, if she’d wanted to.

“My fault...” Yves is muttering to himself as Mance tells him not to do anything stupid, and to only go searching when it’s light, whilst any fool could see Yves wasn’t going to wait that long “All my stupid, bloody fault...”

Sam is not a brave man. Braver men would have asked what he meant. Sam did not, and instead resigned himself to a very long night.

**...**

Grenn realized fairly quickly after entering the woods that he really, really should have told someone where he was going. Because quicker than seems possible, the noise of camp fades, and the light from the fires flickers away and he is alone, in the cold.

He wanders around blindly, calling out Jo’s name, before he realizes that the sound isn’t carrying thanks to the thick foliage, and there’s little to no point. He stamps around for a while, trying to remember his way back, but all the trees look the same and he hadn’t been concentrating, the grass giving no indicator to where he has already trekked like snow did.

Grenn never thought he would miss snow, but here he was. Life did like to have its jokes.

“ _Hello?_ ” A voice shouts in the darkness, and for a moment Grenn thinks it belongs to him, before realizing he hadn’t spoken.

“Hoy!” Grenn shouts at the top of his lungs. “Over here!”

They walk around in circles for a while, before knocking into one another. The voice, which had originally been sexless through the dense wood becomes female. It’s not Jo, Grenn knew that, he knows Jo’s voice, but this girl-

She is tall, thin and flat chested with green eyes the same colour as ivy. She steps quietly and smiles when they finally find one another after minutes of circling.

“Meera Reed,” she introduces herself, and thrusts out her hand for a quick, firm handshake.

“Grenn,” he replies, feeling slightly intimidated by the air of sureness and confidence that surrounds her.

“I’ve been wandering for forever,” she confesses, twirling a strange kind of spear in one hand “I only went to get firewood.”

“I came in to find a friend. I haven’t found her yet.” Grenn says, with a self deprecating smile. Meera laughs, a dimple emerging on her right cheek as she does so.

“Let’s search together then.” she announces “My brother and friends will be getting worried.”

They end up going arm in arm through the trees so as not to blink and lose each other, the thickness of the woods terrifying at times, until their legs ache and eyes can’t stay open. Together they build a fire, a pathetic, spluttering thing compared to the roaring bonfire back at camp, and in no time Grenn in asleep, getting as close as he dares in his flammable furs.

When he wakes the next morning, it’s to too harsh sunlight, the girl gone, spear and all, and a dog lapping at his cheek.

At least, he thinks it’s a dog until he opens his eyes.

**...**

Ghost has not been with her other half in so long, but she’s slipped inside her and been slipped inside so many times in dreams it feels like she’d never left her at all. So she knows the man-human sleeping on the ground, knows his face and his scent and his name.

Ghost knows he is a friend, but also knows humans have a tendancy to be skittish around her, so instead of going in for a playful nip decides to settle on licking a little.

The way he reacts when he wakes, it’s like she’d bitten his arm off.

_Humans, honestly._

Humour bubbles from her other half, among the link that has been so empty for so long, and soon Ghost is barking out a laugh as best she can, and the only one who doesn’t seem to find it funny is the man on the ground, still cursing and not taking his round eyes off of her.

Ghost doesn’t blame him. She is, as her other half said, mere hours ago, love and wonder in her eyes, _magnificent._

**...**

_Queen Cersei. King Joffrey. Meryn Trant. The Hound. The Mountain. Ser Ilyn. The Freys._

Arya is cold, and alone, and doesn’t know what to do. The Hound is snoring loudly next to her.

Robb and Mother are gone, Robb and Mother are gone, Robb and Mother are never coming back, and she still hasn’t come to terms with it although it’s been a sennight.

Where does she go now?

Winterfell is burned to ash, just like the life she’d had before this one of hard roads and cold nights and terrible pain deep inside.

Where does she go now? What does she do now?

Arya feels like screaming the question up to the seven heavens. Robb and Mother and Father and Bran and Rickon were all dead. Sansa was in the capital, trapped like a little bird, as Cersei used to call her, with her clipped wings on display for all the lords and ladies to look at because she’s so very pretty and so very useless. She couldn’t save Robb and Mother, or Bran and Rickon, but neither could Arya. She’s useless too.

Arya longs for Winterfell, for home, for summer snows, and more than anything, although she knows it’s wrong, she longs for her sister.

Not Sansa, Sansa was never her favourite, but more than anything, Arya wants Jo.

Arya wants Jo like she’s never wanted anyone before, she wants Jo to come and stroke her hair and sing her a song about lady knights that Mother never would let her hear, she wants Jo to ruffle up her hair and ruin the Septa’s efforts, she wants Jo to spin her around until the world is just a blur except for her sister’s deep grey eyes. Arya wants Jo to let her into her bed when there’s a thunderstorm, and be confident she won’t tell that she’s scared. Arya wants Jo to call her little sister, with one of her rare smiles on her lips just for her, Arya wants Jo’s warm hugs and wants her light kisses, the only kind Arya never used to mind, Arya wants Jo back, Arya wants Jo now, Arya wants Jo like nobody has ever wanted anybody ever before.

Arya had wanted Jo when Father died, Arya had wanted Jo when she heard of what happened to her little brothers, Arya wanted Jo when she saw what the Freys had done to Robb’s body, Arya wanted Jo when Nymeria found her mother’s corpse, Arya wants Jo at night, when she’s lonely and afraid and cold. Like now.

She should know, she thinks bitterly, that after all this time, Jo isn’t coming. She wishes the stupid wildling had taken the both of them, or even better had taken Sansa, because then they would have searched harder than they searched for Jo, and there’d have been no betrothal to stupid, vicious Joffrey, and perhaps they all could have stayed at home, in Winterfell, safe.

Arya wishes a lot of things. So she concentrates her efforts on something more probable than Jo comforting her, holding her, and begins her prayer to Death again.

_Queen Cersei. King Joffrey. Meryn Trant. The Hound. The Mountain. Ser Ilyn. The Freys._

...

Sam escapes the uneasiness and suspicion in the clearing  by saying he would go have another look for Jo and Grenn around the borders of camp, before rushing towards the woods as quickly as he could in all his thick furs. Yves was impossibly tense and his whole body seemed to vibrate with worry, which quickly soured the happy feeling in the camp, leaving everyone uncomfortable and upset, and two members down.

Grenn’s disappearance had been noted soon after Jo’s, but fewer people seemed concerned. He was still just a crow to them, a crow that had turned his cloak, yes, but Jo was one of them, had become one of them and Yves was third in command of the group after Tormund and the Magnar, who even now were trying to claim seniority by seeing who could order people around the loudest and fastest.

Grenn was just a crow to them, and Jo was Yves’ wife.

The first whisper had come at dawn, when mutters began about how Grenn had already turned his cloak once, treacherous crows with their southroner ways, he could have stolen her in the night - he _had_ been good with a sword, even the Mance said so.

The wildings conveniently forgot that although Grenn had been improving, Jo was his teacher and far more skilled than he.

But only a mere two hours later, as the last of the tents were stuffed into packs, Sam had been sent suspicious, sharp looks every time he met someone’s eyes.

When Sam finally was deep enough into the woods, he made sure he didn’t lose sight of the edge. He knew he wouldn’t last half a day alone in the north’s woods, where any degree of beasts could be lurking.

“Jo? Grenn?” Sam gave several half-hearted shouts, knowing that had they been close enough to camp for a shout to reach them, all of this worry wouldn’t have occurred.

So that is why he lets out a manly scream when he sees three dark, hulking figures coming towards him.

“If I hadn’t seen you, I’d have thought we’d been found by Val!” Grenn japes, the first to come out of the undergrowth.

“Shut up,” Jo says to him, the next to come into focus, a smile in her eyes, on her lips, but weariness dogging her steps “Don’t insult Val like that!”

It’s about then Sam faints, he’d like to say from shock of seeing them, but more from fear from the huge, loping direwolf, with hellish red eyes and bone white fur, which emerges last from the undergrowth.

**...**

“We’re close,” Grenn tells them in the tent, barely daring to say it louder than in a breath “I saw a girl, highborn.”

Sam gnaws on his lip, sucking on it when it begins to bleed.

“Any further we’ll have gone too far,” Edd nods “We have to go back.”

Grenn looks sad, but resigned. Sam hasn’t missed the way he looked at Jo, or at Yves, although he didn't completely understand it, and knows it must be worst for the ranger of the three of them.

“How’ll we find our way through the forest?” Sam whispers “Jo and Grenn already got lost once, we could wander for days.”

“Or _a_ day.” Edd cuts in “Go at noon and we should be able to see through the undergrowth, come out the other side with them unable to follow. From there, it's pretty damn hard to miss the Wall.”

“They’ll catch us,” Sam says, a tremor in his whisper.

“No,” Grenn says “Not if we go to the back of the group with you, as you’re known to fall behind, and then tail off. It’s- it’s a pretty perfect plan.” Grenn doesn’t look pleased with his own assessment.

“Tomorrow, then?” Edd says, and in the stillness of the night Sam thinks he can hear the older man’s teeth grinding in his mouth.

Grenn gives a sharp nod “Tomorrow.”

Sam eases himself back down into his bedroll with a heavy heart. At the Wall, everyone laughed and hated him. Grenn and Edd hadn’t spoken to him before they all got stuck in this mess, separated from the Great Ranging in a streak of bad luck, which continued into getting captured by wildings and Grenn killing Qhorin Halfhand to get them into the camp.

They had to go back.

It didn’t mean, however, that Sam wanted to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed! As always, please leave kudos and a comment if you did like it, it means a ridiculous amount to me.


	3. 3.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "We're gonna live- we could go live in a castle like the one we saw on the way here-"
> 
> Jo forces herself to smiles at that, despite the way her stomach is churning “I told, it was no castle, lover. Only an old tower.”
> 
> Yves shakes his head, too drunk on his own elation to care “Let’s find us a castle then, and live there forever-”
> 
> He leans in to kiss her, but she puts a hand in front of his mouth before he can “We- we haven’t won yet, Yves. If this goes wrong, if we somehow lose, promise me something.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this basically in three days! I'm so proud of myself. It's 2K shorter than usual, but I felt I had to end it where I did for full effect so to even the scales as such I've added another chapter. This is the long awaited Battle of Castle Black :)

Jo runs a slow hand over Ghost’s back, the direwolf’s huge frame curled around Jo’s own, her only sleeping partner for the time being, as Yves was out on watch duty. Her long fingers act as some kind of comb for the otherwise ungroomed fur, catching on knots that Jo patiently unravels.

“What do I do, girl?” she asks the animal, not expecting a reply and not getting one, other than Ghost nuzzling her head more firmly into the space between Jo’s collarbone and neck. The camp was dead silent, it was some ridiculous time in the early hours and the constant trekking was exhausting them all, Jo included. She can hear her own heartbeat thumping, her own breaths and the small movement Ghost makes every now and then. She is so, so tired.

But she can’t sleep.

It has to just be a single mistake, one mistake. She’d been careless, is all, just the once. Carra had been the one to point it out, as Jo was making her own tansy tea.

“You’ve not put in the wormwood, chick,” she said, leaning over Jo’s mortar.

“What?” Jo says, aghast, looking at her own concoction which does look more gritty than the other women’s “Have I not?”

“And where’s yer pennyroyal?” Carra says again, looking at the ingredients around Jo’s potion.

“I,” Jo scratches the back of her neck awkwardly “I didn’t think there was much point. When Val taught me she said the pennyroyal was just to help the taste, so I left it behind.”

Carra clucks her tongue “That girl, all style an’ no sense. It does help with the taste, true, but it also makes the ‘ole thing function properly. And without wormwood, chick, then you’ve just been having some nasty tea for no reason.”

Jo remembers feeling dizzy at that. “I need-” she said, as her stomach churned at the implications of drinking useless tansy “I think I need to lie down.”

“You alright, chick?” Carra had asked in concern “You can have some o’mine to tide ya’ through.”

“That’s, that’s very kind,” Jo says “But I’m okay. I’m just going to-”

She had stumbled to her tent, barely reaching it before her breakfast consisting of eggs and berries had laid itself in her and Yves’ latrine pit, and thankfully nowhere near their beds.

Jo had counted desperately on her fingers, and then on her toes and then in her head, how long she’d been making the tea without Val’s guidance, how long since she and Yves had coupled, how long she’d been having the strange sickness in the morning and the bitter feeling in her mouth, how long since she’d last bled.

Too long. Too long for it to be anything else.

So it can’t have only been a one time mistake - she’d rooted around in her pack for the wormwood, and it was at the very bottom, full to the brim and clearly unused for the entire journey. How many moon teas had she made, thinking she was protected and safe? At least two moons worth, probably more like three if she’s being honest.

She’d begged off supper, knowing it was only rock-hard biscuits and salted beef, and although Yves had been concerned he knew when not to bother her, after the years they’d been together, after all they’d been through - climbing that goddamn Wall twice, fucking white walkers, the crows coming and going in the night, finding Ghost and the illness that had hit the camp and taken a quarter of them with it when it finally left.

That had what she’d thought the sickness had been - Yves had been so worried, seldom leaving her alone and clucking over her like a mother hen, barely letting her do anything for herself.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she swears, burying her head in Ghost’s fur to try and stop the tears.

The worst part is she had wanted children. If she’d been trueborn, she’d have been married off about the same time Yves stole her, and she’d had these dreams as a child of her trueborn babes all healthy and rosy cheeked, and later of redheaded babes that skipped in snow, safe and sound. An old dream, that she’d thought for one beautiful moment could come true.

But this was no dream - this was reality.

The winter would last at least as long as the summer, which had been ongoing for over a decade, and with the Others coming with it... this was not the world she wanted to bring a child into, one where the monsters from fairytales were coming, and a great bloody wall of ice, seven hundred feet high, wasn’t guaranteed to stop them.

She couldn’t go to Winterfell - Lady Stark was there, and Robb and Father wouldn’t understand how she felt about Yves, and Sansa would tell Jeyne Poole just loud enough so that Jo could hear that she’d never survive the shame of it, having her bastard sister bring a wilding bastard into their home. She could even hear Theon, cackling and saying _blood always tells._

So the only option is to keep going South, as far South as South goes, down to Dorne or to Lys or somewhere else so warm the Others would melt the moment they stepped there.

But not Jo. Jo and Yves, as much as they had ice and snow in their veins, they were survivors and they’d survive a land of Always Summer if they had to - they were flesh and blood. But here, now? They wouldn’t survive winter.

“What do I do?” Jo asks Ghost again, who simply lets out a long, silent yawn.

When Yves returns, Jo feigns sleep as he slides into bed beside her, but her eyes flick open as soon as his breaths become even.

She touches her stomach gently - it is as flat as a board, as flat as it has always been and there’s nothing there but her internal organs - at least, nothing she can feel.

_Let me be wrong,_ she prays to the Old Gods before she finally falls into fitful dreams full of blood and cold and pain, _let me be wrong and let us be lucky, just this once. Just this once._

But she knows the time for that particular prayer had passed moons before.

**...**

“The greatest fire the North has ever seen,” Yves tells her, in quick, frantic words the next morning, the early morning light filtering through the skins of the tent letting her see his smile that looks like his face is about to split in two “We haven’t got much further. A week or two tops, then we’re gonna sit about a bit and wait, and then, we attack. Even if they have a thousand men like the crows said, we can wreck them easy - can you see it, lover? A hundred thousand of us, that bloody wall won’t stand a hope in hell.”

“And then everyone can come over?” She says, hope spitting like a kindling fire in her chest. Ghost climbed off her and padded out the tent when Yves had arrived, and Jo thinks if Ghost weren’t mute right now they’d hear her howling triumphantly.

“Aye, all of ‘em, every last one from the babes to the spearwives to the clubfoots and cave dwellers - we’re gonna _live_. We can go live in one of those castles we saw on the way here-”

Jo forces herself to smiles at that, despite the way her stomach is churning “I told, it was no castle, lover. Only an old tower.”

Yves shakes his head, too drunk on his own elation to care “Let’s find us a castle then, and live there forever-”

He leans in to kiss her, but she puts a hand in front of his mouth before he can “We- we haven’t won yet, Yves. If this goes wrong, if we somehow lose, promise me something.”

Yves’ brow puckers, but he nods easy enough, the light rays growing stronger now and catching his hair in such a way that he looks like he’s burning - she remembers when she’d first properly seen him by the fire, all flame and mischief.

Lucky.

No white walker could kill you, nor a wight or crow neither. Lucky.

“Anything, Jo,” he says, caressing her cheek with his rough, callused fingertips where she can feel where he puts the bow string.

She reaches up and places her hand on his own on the side of her face, before bringing it down to her lips and kissing it “If we lose, somehow, anyhow, promise me we’ll leave them.”

“Wha-” Yves says, lips thinning.

“I know they’re your people, darling,” She interrupts, feeling like the worst woman in the world “They are mine too. But you mean more to me than anything in this world. You have to promise me to come south, you have to, because I can’t go north again. I can’t.”

Yves wrenches himself free of her grip, eyes full of confusion and some kind of vitriol.

“What is this?” he spits, movement sharp and fast and furious “What happened to you?”

He goes to get up, but Jo tugs him back down hard and sharp and he tumbles down. “I know it is not your way, lover,” she says, desperate for him to understand why she’s saying these things, what she’s saying “But I need you now, like I’ve never needed you before. Do you think I want to leave them? I’m not saying don’t fight, because I am, I couldn’t face myself if I didn’t-”

“I couldn’t face myself if I ran,” Yves whispers harshly “Not with you, not for anything. That’s not who I am. I didn’t come all this way to run like a craven with my tail between my legs.”

“You said you loved me,” she grips so tight onto his hand she thinks his bones might grind together “Prove you meant it. You think any of them hundred thousand wildlings gives a flying fuck if you ran south if it all went balls up and you had the opportunity? You think any of them would care?”

“Mance-” Yves says, but Jo won’t let him say any more.

“Mance wouldn’t give a shit what you did. He’s for the many, not the few, and he’d want you to live if you had a chance not go chasing after a doomed cause. They don’t care about us. The only people who cares about me and you is you and me.”

“Is it them fuckin’ crows?” Yves says “’Cause what they think don’t mean shit. Let them run back to Castle Black. I hope they get killed for turning their cloaks twice, like the cowards they are-”

“You don’t mean that,” Jo says “Just _... think_. Think, lover. The Starks, my family, the entire bloody North will come even if we do win, and they’ll be hunting us down like dogs. Me and you are smaller, safer together - please. _Please.”_

Yves snorts “Your family? You left your family, you chose me-”

“You think they’re not my family anymore just because I love you? Because I chose you? They’re still my family, I’m still a bastard and I’m still a Great Lord’s daughter, that hasn’t changed, it never will, just because I love you. I can be more than one thing at once-”

“Really?” Yves scoffs, bitterly “You’re looking more and more like a little pampered little princess from the South to me every moment.”

“You take that back.” Jo pushes Yves away, and he stumbles back and barely manages to right himself before he goes careening out of the tent.

He shakes his head, hard and fast. There are two identical pink spots high on his cheeks, and he looks like a stubborn mule about to kick anyone that comes too close. “It’s true. You’re just out for yourself; you’re like the rest of them-”

“That’s a lie, you bastard, and you know it. I love the free folk, but I love you more. I’m asking you to _live_ for me, on the chance this goes badly. Are you so desperate for death?”

“It won’t!” Yves shouts, the both of them finally coming out of whispers and into bellowing in one simple step “We’ll live with the rest of them, it won’t go bad and I won’t run on a ‘just in case’. I won’t!”

“Do you know what we’re taught down South?” She says, quietly, fury burning through every part of her blood, “Every child in the North knows. Wildlings don’t win. They never win. No matter how big, no matter how strong, eventually some lord, usually the Starks, comes and chases them back beyond the Wall, and the King Beyond the Wall is a villain in bedtime stories. Wildings always lose, it’s only a matter of time.”

“Mance will be the first.” Yves says, jaw locked and hands shaking by his sides.

“No he won’t,” Jo knows she sounds like a cackling witch from a nightmare, but she can’t help it, tears glisten in her eyes but she refuses to let them fall even as Yves’ face becomes distorted “They said that about Joramun, about Bael the Bard, about Gendel and Gorne, about the Horned Lord and Raymun Redbeard, and they all _died_ , as did all their sons and daughters and friends and wives, and Mance will be the same.”

“So what are you doing here?” Yves bellows, spreading his arms wide “Why are you here? If us _wildlings_ are so doomed and stupid, why are you here?”

If Jo wasn’t so angry, she’d say it was because she loved him. Because she loved their way of life and she loved Val and she loved freedom and again because she loved him.

But Jo is so, so angry.

“Because some bastard from the freefolk decided to kidnap a little girl who didn’t know any better from her bed _and took her away from her family!”_

Jo regrets it the moment she says it, but she can’t take it back and she’s just left panting in the middle of the tent, Yves looking at her like he’s never seen her before. The room feels like it’s suddenly ran out of air, and they will choke on the anger of the other.

“Ha,” he says, finally, the sound twisted by the thickness in this throat “Is that all I was to you? Is that all we were?”

Jo runs a hand through her hair, and feels like something inside her is dying “No. Yves, no-”

He lets out another sound of derision “Save your pretty words. I know how you feel-”

“ _No_ ,” Jo says, forcefully “You don’t. You can’t know how I feel-”

“Maybe not,” he says, lip wobbling “I thought I knew you. But now... now I don’t even recognise you anymore.”

“You do know me,” she cries, the first tear finally escaping, a hiccup escaping her throat “And I do know you. And I’m not asking because I’m a coward, I’m asking because I’m afraid.”

“What have you got to fear?” he spits “You’re going to be on the winning side no matter what. You’ll get taken home and comforted about how that good for nothing wilding brainwashed you, and all these years will be nothing but a mistake, while we all die either by sword or by cold or by wight. What do you know of fear? Nothing.”

“I fear for you.” Jo says, truthfully “I fear for all of us. I fear for Val and for Mance and for my father and my sisters and my brothers.”

Yves strides towards her then and takes her arms in his hand and shakes her, hard “Do you think I’m not afraid?” He curses.

He’s crying too now.

“Do you think I want to fight? Do you think I want to die?”

“I don’t know,” she says, words getting trapped in her throat “I don’t know, anymore. I want to be with you. I want to live. I want our-”

She cuts herself off, but it’s too late.

“You want our what?” Yves says, chin trembling. He eases his death grip off her arms and bring a palm up to her chin, pushing it up so she meets his eyes “You want our what?”

“Yves-” she says, but he doesn’t stop.

“You want our _what?”_ his voice breaks on the last word. “Tell me what you want. _Tell me.”_

“Our baby.” she says, her mouth turning down at the sides “I want our baby safe.” Jo barely manages to force the words out before a strangled, dying sound comes out of her throat as her body finally sobs desperately, her legs weak.

“Shh,” Yves rubs her back in circular motions, but she can feel his own tears on her shoulder “Shh. It’s okay, it’s okay.”

“I only found out yesterday,” she says “I’ve been making my moon tea wrong, it was a mistake, I didn’t mean, I didn’t-”

“Shh,” Yves says again, pulling her into a hard hug “Shh, I don’t blame you, I don’t-”

“What are we going to _do?”_ Jo wails, feeling like a young child again who stubbed her toe or had a toy stolen from her hands. Over and over in her head, she couldn’t stop thinking _it wasn’t supposed to be like this._

“We’re going to win this battle,” Yves tells her “Or not. But either way, afterwards we’re going south. We’re going to go as quick as we can, so our baby is born somewhere warm. I could be an archer and hunt our dinner, you could sell your sword or stay at home or learn to sew, because we’ll be able to do anything. We’re going to be the best damn parents the world has ever seen-”

“I thought you wouldn’t run.” Jo mumbles against Yves’ collarbone “Not for me, not for anything.”

Yves licks his lips, before one hand drifts down to Jo’s stomach. A smile, breakable soft but _there_ appears. “You know nothing, Joanna Snow. And apparently neither do I. I didn’t mean to, but I did. Because I would for this.”

“Really?” she hiccups, throat dry as she brings her head up so her eyes meet his.

“Yes,” he says, face blotchy and almost as red as his hair “I love you, Jo. I love you, and I love our baby, and I swear to you that _I would for this_.”

They don’t come apart for an age after that.

**...**

Jo dreams she is in Winterfell.

When she went to sleep, they were just beneath a great hill which hid them from the Watch’s vantage point of the gate, but made sure they were close enough to launch the attack when they saw the fire.

She and Yves had been huddled together by a campfire, there being little point in setting up camp, and Jo remembered just before she dropped off to sleep thinking she didn’t want the next day to come.

In the Winterfell of her dreams, it was snowing. She remembers it as she last saw it, the walls tall and grey and a fire burning in every hearth, the sound of Mikken’s forge as familiar as the howling of the wind, and children’s laughter all around her. Ravens fly overhead, cawing out their warnings. This is her home, and it always will be to some degree.

Jo blinked, and there was Robb, but only for a moment, still looking as young as she had last seen him, snowflakes melting in his hair. Then his russet curls grew, as did his height and the width of his shoulders, and he looked a man.

“Joanna,” he says, smiling and making to step towards her, before suddenly he stops, his face drops and his skin goes grey.

“Robb?” she asks, and tries to take a step forward, but can’t. She has not seen her brother in almost three years.

“Jeyne,” he says his eyes far away. “Mother... Grey Wind.” Then, he drops to his knees, and then to the ground, blood pooling around his corpse.

“ _Robb_!” Jo screams, but even as she cries her legs propel her away from his body, and towards the crypts.

Suddenly, the castle is empty. She can’t hear anything anymore, no children and no footsteps, no swords clashing and no fires, and when she turns her head to look back at Robb’s body, there is nothing there but snow. Every step is agony as her body numbs in the terrible cold, but her heart is so burning hot in her chest, and she is so afraid.

She finds herself at the door to the crypts. It’s black inside, and even though Jo knows there are steps spiralling down, she feels as if it will eat her whole. Somehow she knows she has to go down there, but she doesn’t want to. She’s never wanted to do anything less.

_I’m afraid of what might be waiting for me_ , Jo realizes. _The old Kings of Winter_ _are down there, sitting on their thrones with stone wolves at their feet and iron swords across their laps, but it’s not_ them _I’m afraid of._

Jo remembers screaming “ _I’m not a_ _Stark_ _, this isn’t my place_!” but it’s no good, she has to go anyway, so slowly, so, so slowly, she starts down start down, feeling the walls as she descends, all the candles snuffed out, with no torch to light the way.

It gets darker and darker, until she wants to scream, but she has to keep going, she has to keep going, her legs won’t stop even though she desperately wants them to, and the staircase seems to go on forever.

“Joanna,” she reaches the bottom the same time she hears the voice and spins around. It is pitch black still, but she hears where it is coming from. “Joanna,” her father’s voice says again.

“Father?” she speaks into the emptiness, and can hear her voice shaking “Father, why are you down here?”

Just when she thinks he is gone, Eddard Stark speaks again “Why are you? _This is not your place.”_

It isn’t her father anymore, the voice has a death rattle that Ned Stark never had, and it becomes one with the wind, the damned wind still howling down in the depths of the earth, cutting her cheeks and stealing the breath from her lungs.

“This is not your place,” the dead man whispers, and it sounds like he is right next to her.

Jo wakes with a start, her heart hammering within her chest and barely fighting down a scream. She lies there, breathing frantically, listening desperately to the wind for a voice to follow it for what feels like hours. Slowly, her hand drifts down from where it is clenched around her chin, covering her mouth, to her barely convex belly.

She must have slipped off to sleep again at some point, as impossible as that feels after the nightmare, for she wakes again to Yves’ gentle shaking. At first she thinks it is morning, by the orange glow that surrounds them, but quickly her mind catches up with her and she realizes it can only be one thing, as they are not sleeping in a tent and she can still see a full moon above them.

“It’s time,” he says, and their eyes lock in determination.

“I love you,” she tells him.

“And I you.” he replies, placing a hard, long kiss on her forehead, then two on her cheeks, and a final desperate press of his lips to hers, before they rise together. “I love you.”

Jo promises herself that this is not the last time that he’ll hold her like this.

**...**

Jo can hear mammoths and see the fires in the sky, but the Wall blocks the flames and beasts from her sight. They run like wolves, fast and deadly, and from the brothers Jo can make out on the gate she sees their heads are all turned towards the screams coming through the air from the Wall - Jo doesn’t know which side it is.

They’re a pack, all in tune with one another in a way they’ve never truly been before, iron in the back of their mouths and desperation pumping the blood through their muscles. Ghost is at the front of the spearhead like an omen of death.

Their party soon catch the crows’ attention however,  as any self preservation instinct comes back in full force for the brothers astonishingly quickly as Tormund leaps at the gates with his pickaxe and begins to climb, leading a flood of them up the wooden blockade - the party that had sat in the south for so long and waited for this.

“There! Wildings!” the cry goes up, all along the gate and into the courtyard.

They use pitch, but it doesn’t touch them and they keep on coming. They tip flaming oil down on them, but Tormund and the Magnar have reached the top by then, and the flow barely hits any of them as it’s intercepted by the huge men. They keep on coming.

Like a disease, a sickness, like light, like water.

Jo loses track of time - she is surrounded by blood and screaming and clashes of steel on steel, and she is responsible for some of the bodies, and a lot of the blood. Not many of the Watch want to fight a woman hand to hand, but she gives them no option and soon they forget any preconceptions they had about killing and harming women when she begins kicking them into the dirt, her two swords stained red.

Or maybe they had none at all, and their hesitance was simply her imagination - the Wall was mainly manned by murderers, thieves and rapists.

That thought spurred Jo on even more.

The man she’s fighting currently, a stringy haired brunette, loses his sword and his life in one blow. No one takes his place for the mement - they should be able to take the castle if not the Wall, as there were about a hundred men down here, not a thousand, the number depleting by the second.

She catches sight of Yves out the of corner of her eye - he’s gotten to high ground, and her heart swells with pride to see how quickly he’s knocking his bow and how many men have fallen to his arrows. He sees her looking and him, and grins in such a way that she knows he’s thinking _we’re winning, we’re winning, we’re winning._

Reinforcements come down in waves from the top, and Jo’s sides begin to ache terribly, along with her feet and hands. She has a gash above her eye, with blood dripping down and impeding her vision, but she doesn’t fall.

It has been going around two hours when the very earth beneath her feet shakes.

“MAG!” Voices from the outside of the gate come, louder and louder, closer and closer “MAG THE MIGHTY! MAG THE MIGHTY! MAG! MAG! MAG!”

There’s a flurry among the Watch as they realize what is happening, and where the vibrations are coming from. The gate, the huge damn gate that’s made of iron and steel and the blood of her people for too damn long, is buckling.

Jo lets out a whoop, feeling for one long moment invincible. She weaves and dodges and three men making for the gate don’t reach it because of her. She spins around, heart pounding in her chest and her head and in her stomach and her thighs and her wrists. Her mouth is as dry as some of Rattleshirt’s bones, but she doesn’t care.

For a moment, she is so high on euphoria she doesn’t recognize the slumped form on the muddy ground - the light is awful, but all her joy turns to dread unlike anything she’s felt before when she sees Yves’ face. And the arrow sticking out of his chest.

She drops her short sword without a thought, leaving only her bastard in her hand as she runs to him, swinging clumsily as horror makes her suddenly feel the cold like she never has before in all her years - nobody dies, but she messily cuts into one man’s shoulder, and a boy’s forearm - but she doesn’t care about them.

“Yves, Yves,” she pulls him from the ground with her aching arms, hands shaking. He’s bigger than her, always has been - she’s a compact woman, and her muscles have all turned to jelly “Lover, lover, Yves, _Yves-_ ”

“J-Joanna Snow,” he croaks out.

At that, Jo comes apart. “Don’t- don’t talk.”

As always, Yves doesn’t listen to her.

“Jo- Jo, is this a real castle now? Not just a tower?”

Jo nods, feeling as if all her breath has been stolen and her heart has been ripped to shreds inside her chest. She would check if she’s been caught there, but she doesn’t dare look away from Yves’ face.

“It is,” Jo says. The words come out strangled, but Yves understands anyway, a faint almost-smile twitching at the sides of his bloodless lips. Jo reaches out, and takes his hand in hers, and tries to squeeze life back into it. It feels as cold as ice. But that couldn’t be right - Yves was kissed by fire, he was a tongue of flame.

“Good,” he whispered, so quiet, too quiet for him “I wanted t’see one proper castle before... before I...”

Jo pulls him into her arms more firmly so she is carrying nearly all of his weight mere centimetres off the ground - as if that will keep him with her.

“You’ll see a hundred castles.” Jo promises, and she can hear how her own voice is shaking “We’ll have one of our very own. The battle’s all but done. There’s a maester here, he’ll look after you. You’re kissed by fire, remember? Lucky.”

“Lucky,” Yves looks like he’s trying to laugh but he just chokes up blood. “I was lucky to know you. I was lucky to love you.” He gasps out the words quickly, as if he’ll never have the chance to say them again.

“It will take more than an arrow to kill you,” Jo tells him, “The maester will draw it out and patch you up, and I’ll get you milk of the poppy for the pain. We’re going south, remember? We’re going to have a baby-”

He just smiled at that, like it was some far off, unachievable dream. “D’you remember that cave? I wish we’d stayed in that cave.”

“We’ll go back there,” Jo swore to him, shaking him slightly as his eyelids began to slide shut, his words dogged with exhaustions “You’re not going to die, Yves. You’re not, you can’t.”

“Oh,” Yves cupped her cheek with his hand, “You know nothing Joanna Snow,” he sighed, dying.

“Yves?” she says, as his hand drops away from her cheek. She shakes him again, like she did before, and again, and again. “Yves? Yves! _Yves!”_ Her voice becomes this mouselike squeak that tears at her throat until it just becomes a high pitched unintelligible noise she’s making and tears run down her cheeks uncontrollably, like waterfalls.

The battle, which had been so important, which had meant so much, means nothing now. She can’t even hear it anymore. If she could, she’d hear Tormund swearing and her comrades screaming, she’d hear that Mag the Mighty has fallen, the gate has not been breached, they are trapped and there’s too many crows now and too few of them. But Jo cannot hear a thing - not even her own breathing. Perhaps she had died with him?

“ _Yves,”_ she groans his name, planting kisses all over his death mask “Come back, come back, please, please, come back, you’re lucky, lucky, kissed by fire, an arrow can’t kill you-”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please, please, please don't kill me. Please. Also please review, but I feel like I should put more emphasis on not killing me right now. 
> 
> Please.


	4. 4.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jo sees a familiar face three days into her captivity - all the black brothers look the same to her in this little box room they’ve shoved her into with all the other spear wives. They rotate, giving them stale water and too little food, hatred clear on their faces. Soon, the smell of vomit, waste and infection grows until Jo feels ill just being in the same room as the women slowly dying. Occasionally, one of the women begins telling a story in a cracked voice, but dwindles off. 
> 
> Jo is not one of these women. 
> 
> (Yves was dead.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! I had wanted to make this chapter a bit longer, but in the end I decided that this would be the 'aftermath' of the battle, so the story has yet again become longer. I suddenly have the deepest sympathy for GRRM. Anyway, enjoy! As always, please tell me what you thought in the comments :)

Jo sees a familiar face three days into her captivity - all the black brothers look the same to her in this little box room they’ve shoved her into with all the other spear wives. They rotate, giving them stale water and too little food, hatred clear on their faces. Soon, the smell of vomit, waste and infection grows until Jo feels ill just being in the same room as the women slowly dying. Occasionally, one of the women begins telling a story in a cracked voice, but dwindles off. Jo is not one of these women.

(Yves was dead.)

The crows never spoke to them, but Jo had tried to ask with some of the other able bodied women what all the noise was about, the thundering hooves, trumpets and the drums. After them had come banging doors, and screams that all faded in time. None of them said a word or even reacted, save one which smiled so wide that Jo could see he only had three, rotted teeth in his mouth.

She begins to lose track of time. It feels like all she can hear is the groans of sickness, and by the third day, congealed blood has made its way onto her hands despite her trying not to touch anyone else, the smell of sick coming into her furs and every time her stomach contracts she’s reminded of the baby living there too - perhaps her baby knows there’s not much point to anything anymore, not without Yves. It’s over for her, now. Finished.

Jo remembers they had dragged her away from his body, and she’d been so weak and emotionally exhausted she hadn’t been able to struggle free. The last she’d seen of him was his corpse being dragged to a pile with all the other dead.

(Yves was dead.)

The smoke hadn’t registered in her head when they’d burnt them, Jo hadn’t been conscious, not really. But later, later it did. Later, she knew that the man she’d known as Yves was now nothing but ash. Later, she’d had to stuff her hand in her mouth and scream so as not to wake the wounded from fitful slumber, the sound raw and primal, ripping its way out of her throat.

On the third day, the door opens and Jo is pulled to her feet roughly by some of the crows, along with the five other women who aren’t diseased or wounded. They’re led through twisting corridors but never outside, and Jo hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the fresh air after living in it almost constantly for three years.

The room they’re deposited in is much the same, with four black walls and no furniture. Jo claims the corner closest to the door as quick as she can, her legs as weak as a newborn foals, unused and untested for so long, gasping in the fresh air that comes through the small, eye level hole in the door like she’s just been suffocated.

(Yves was dead.)

Ten minutes, thirty, an hour, or perhaps two later - the door is unlocked and an old man in black robes stumbles in, his eyes as white as his hair. But it isn’t the old man that Jo knows, it’s the crow escorting him.

Sam looks just as fat as he had the last time Jo saw him, months before. His piggy eyes are wide in his face, and he’s not wounded as far as she can see. Perhaps Yves taught him too well. That had been her fault too, she supposed.

She wonders if it was Sam’s arrow that caught Yves right in the heart.

“Jo?” Sam says when he sees her, curled in a ball on the floor, but she resolutely doesn’t look at him, or make any sign she’s heard him at all. She knows she must look a fright, but she feels like that too, so why shouldn’t she?

(Yves was dead.)

The old man putters forward, and out of the corner of her eye Jo sees Sam’s large frame follow him. He bends down in front of Nomi and begins touching her and speaking to her gently in a hushed voice, southron in accent but northern in tone.

They stay for what must be ten minutes, moving from one woman to another. Jo is the last one they come to, and despite knowing what’s coming, she still jerks when the old man places his hands on her face. They’re cold and soft, and Jo can’t remember how long it’s been since her own hands were so unused.

“Hello, my dear,” he hums, in his cracked, old voice. He puts his hands on the side of her neck, under her chin, asks her to give him her wrist and bend her knees and elbows, back and forth, back and forth, until he’s satisfied.

When he asks her to lift up her fur to reveal her stomach, Jo thinks nothing of it, as he’d done the same to the others so complies, her movements mechanical. The maester - and he must be a maester, she had known that Castle Black had one like every other castle in the Seven Kingdoms - presses one, large, lily white ear to her stomach and prods around a bit.

It takes all Jo has to tell him to stop, not so hard, because she has no intention of giving the Watch her and Yves’ child too. She’d already lost too much. She’d rose too high, loved too much, dared too hard. She’d tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell.

She was still falling from an incredible height, or so it felt.

(Yves was dead.)

The maester finally removes his too-soft fingers from her midriff, and she tugs her fur back down again sharply, crossing her arms in front of her quickly as if that will protect her from Sam’s wide eyes, that she knows are fixed on her.

The old man shuffles out the room, but Sam lingers for a moment.

“Jo-” He begins.

“Get out.” She snaps, her body thrumming with- something. It’s the closest she’s come to feeling something other than complete and utter, all consuming, despair since Yves had-

Since she’d been a captive.

Sam, thankfully, is not a brave man, so he complies. The door swings shut with some terrible finality behind him.

...

It can’t be more than an hour later when the door opens again.

This time it’s Grenn, but she can’t even look at him for longer than a second. His gruff voice and wavy hair transport her back to the morning of Yves’ return, before everything went wrong: _you like him,_ she’d teased, a lifetime ago.

(Yves was dead.)

“Jo,” Grenn crouches down to his haunches, his face centimetres away from hers, but she lets her eyes focus on a spider’s web in the corner, where a fly was struggling in its secure bindings. “Jo,” he says again, more forcefully.

Although the room is silent, Jo can hear a faint buzzing in her ears, growing louder and louder.

“Joanna,” he uses her full name, reaches out to touch her, but she slaps his hand away.

“Don’t touch me,” she mumbles, her words slurring together, her tongue feeling heavy in her mouth from disuse.

“Okay, okay,” he backs off, content to have her attention.

“What do you want?” she says in a monotone voice.

“The wildling army is defeated,” Grenn tells her. The other women in the room suddenly prick up their ears at the news.

Jo would have been with them once, but she has nothing to care for anymore.

“How?” she croaks.

“Stannis Baratheon marched,” Grenn tells her “They were well organized, cut through the free folk like butter. Mance has surrendered.”

“Has he kneeled?” One of the other women asks, her voice desperate and eyes wet “Did the Mance kneel?”

Grenn looks at the stranger for a long moment, before shaking his head “He refused. He said the free folk do not kneel.”

The woman sat back, shivering but satisfied. Jo felt nothing at all.

 _Doomed,_ she thinks, melancholy heavy in every thought she has, _doomed from the start._

(Yves was dead.)

Grenn turns back to her, and when he sees her eyes have slunk away from him again he clicks his fingers in front of her face until she concentrates, and it’s harder than it should be.

“Leave me alone,” she tells him.

Grenn’s lips thin behind his beard “No, Jo. You shouldn’t be alone right now.” He reaches out to grab her arm, but thinks better of it, and retracts his arm.

“ _Leave_ ,” she says again “I don’t want to see you, turncloak.”

Grenn recoils as if she’d slapped him.

“I had to, Jo,” he says quietly, voice pleading “I had to go back. I had to honour the Halfhand’s sacrifice. I was- I was honour bound-”

Jo meets his eyes then for the first time in the conversation, even though it makes her head ache something awful “Don’t you talk to me of honour. Don’t you talk to me of sacrifice. Get out.” And when he doesn’t immediately follow her order, she screams “ _Get out!”_

But he doesn’t.

“I’m not leaving without you-”

“Go!” she half screeches, half sobs, and slaps her hands over her ears, shaking “Go away! Leave! Get out! I don’t want you here, nobody wants you here, traitor, turncloak-”

(Yves was dead.)

In one smooth movement, Grenn’s fist comes toward her, frighteningly quickly, so quick she can’t even scream, and she knows no more.

...

“Are you sure?”

The voice that brings her into consciousness is one she recognises.

She remembers Sam Tarly’s fear very well, the way he’d squeaked at the slightest unexpected movement, the stuttering when he thought he’d done something wrong, the way his body locked up when he saw something coming for him.

But she’d never heard it quite like this.

“Quite sure, Tarly,” a cracked, old voice replies. That must be the maester.

“But, I mean, how can you know-”

“I know,” the maester says, his calmness a contrast to Sam’s panicked tone.

Someone swallows thickly.

“The king won’t be happy,” Sam says, quietly.

“I dare say he won’t,” The maester replies, and someone uncorks a bottle, by the sounds of it.

“Please, Maester Aemon, don’t make me tell him,” the young man begs his mentor “I’ll just make a mess of it, and make him even angrier.”

“And yet,” the Maester says “The king has to know.”

“Know what?” Joanna is shocked by how raw her own voice sounds, as she opens her eyes. Sam jumps when she moves to sit up, and bustles over to push her back down.

For the first time, Jo feels a pulsing area of pain under her eye.

“Lady Snow,” the Maester says from the corner of the room, his white eyes staring off into nothingness “we apologise for your rude awakening.”

“Know _what?”_ Jo says again, more forcefully.

“About your pregnancy,” Maester Aemon replies smoothly. Sam makes a choking noise next to her. “I assume you were aware.”

A despair settles heavily in Jo’s gut.

They knew.

(Yves was dead.)

“I was,” she says, sharply.

“You will have the babe in six moons, maybe a little less,” Aemon tells her, puttering over to where she lays, and placing his wrinkled hands of her stomach - she isn’t wearing her furs anymore, and feels naked in just the white top and smallclothes she has on now “Everything seems to be normal.”

“Why would the king want to know about my pregnancy?” she asks again. She’d never met King Robert, for all her father talked about him, his greatest friend in the world. Then, a terrible thought came to her, which chilled her to the very bone. “My father isn’t here, is he?” Her voice fails a little at the mere thought.

 _(This is not your place,_ the dead man from her dream whispers in her ear and Jo can’t contain her shiver.)

“No,” Maester Aemon’s reply is delayed this time, and his blank eyes look... _sorry,_ somehow.

“My uncle?” she asks “My brother?” Another terrible thought occurs to her “Lady Stark?”

The maester shakes his head “None of your family are here, child. Don’t fret.”

Jo releases a breath “Then why does the king have to be told about my baby?”

Maester Aemon opens his mouth, and minutes later, Jo wishes she’d never asked.

**...**

Sam and Aemon departed after breaking the news to her, to leave her in her grief.

None of it made any sense, none - Father dead, Robb dead, Bran dead, Rickon dead, Arya dead, Sansa lost, Theon a turncloak, Lady Stark dead-

Jo empties the meagre contents of her stomach all over the Maester’s floor.

“Father,” she croaks out into the empty room, hoping for a sign to show they were wrong, they were wrong, they were all wrong. But nothing happens. The room is still and silent, and an animalistic sound tears itself out of her throat.

“Father, father, father-” she repeats the word, over and over, for something, anything, to come, but nothing does and all she does is make herself light headed and realize she can never call any man that again. Her father was gone. Her father was gone.

Joanna remembers how he held her when she was little, placing her on top of his shoulders when no one else was aroud and making her jump up and town so her little ringlets got all messed up, the way he used to kiss her cheek with his dry lips and tell her _you are my blood, Joanna._

The blood of Winterfell.

The sickness clawed its way up Joanna’s throat again as she thought that she was the very last with that blood in her veins. Winterfell was gone too, at least the Winterfell she’d known.

She’d never loved Lady Stark, but she’d loved her children - her children all dead. There would be no homecoming for Robb, her brother, her best brother, who had let her crawl into his bed and listened to her worries and taught her how to cartwheel-

Her brother, a king. Her brother, a killer. Her brother, a conqueror. Her brother, a corpse.

 _The King in the North._ Aemon said he won every battle, but lost the war, and she thinks about their hero when they were children-

“ _I’m_ Daeron the Young Dragon!” she remembers that she and Robb would cry the young king’s name from the battlements of Winterfell at least once a week, and bicker over who could be the conqueror of Dorne in their games.

There is a horrible, bitter taste in Jo’s throat as she thinks that all Robb is now is these memories - he had no son, like Daeron, and he died, like Daeron, and he had a wife she’d never met and probably never would.

Ghost paws at the door, and Jo can’t rise to her feet to let her in.

They replaced his head with Grey Wind’s. They cut it off, they threw Lady Stark’s body in the river, they butchered her countrymen, the Freys, the Freys broke guest right and killed her brother, her brother, she had belonged with her brother-

Her brother was dead.

(Yves was dead.)

Her brother was dead.

Her brothers were dead.

Sweet Bran and wild little Rickon, so small and innocent and kind, so full of possibility and hope and promise, burned to a crisp and hung up on the walls of a place they’d called home. Burned by a boy who had been there when they’d been born.

If she’d been there, she thinks desperately, blinking back tears, she’d have told Robb not to trust Theon, never, never, she could have saved them, she could have stopped it all, she could have-

But she wasn’t there, and her baby brothers were gone - all ash and blackened bone. Sansa was just a rumour of a rumour, a girl that grew wings and killed a king and disappeared, and Jo hopes she hasn’t changed so much that she wouldn’t know the ladylike girl if she passed her in the street.

And Arya, worst of all Arya - her little, messy, magical, wild sister, gone without a grave or a resting place or a goodbye or a kiss - gone. Jo feels like something in her died the moment Arya was listed among the dead.

Her sister, alone in the wilderness, broken in the storm and the dark and a lion’s roar of rage, her sister, her sister, gone, gone, gone.

“Arya,” she whispers the name along with the wind, feeling as if she’s being stabbed right in the heart with each syllable she forces past her chapped lips, the words echoing in the empty room. She is so alone. “Little sister. Come back,” she begs, voice failing, “come back.” She bloodies her fists as she pummels the walls.

She remembers when Arya had climbed on her shoulders, her lap, when she’d clung to her calves and knotted up her hair, when she’d said Jo’s name for the first time and Jo had kissed her plump red cheeks, which made the little girl giggle.

Only a little girl, she was only a little girl, she’d never see ten namedays, she’d never see a winter or a mammoth or a giant, she’d never meet Jo’s baby or become a knight or fall in love - she was only a little girl, and she deserved so much more.

 _The lone wolf dies but the pack survives,_ her father’s mantra repeats in her brain like a tattoo, over and over, _the lone wolf dies, the lone wolf dies._

“We need to survive,” Jo tells the small bump of her stomach, that she feels as if she’s imagining half the time “We need to survive for them.”

She doesn’t say live - she doesn’t feel like she’ll ever truly be alive again.

(Everyone was dead.)

**...**

Jo is summoned before Stannis Baratheon five days after being told of her family’s fate - it would have been sooner, but she was a wreck before then, a mess of tears and long silences and screams to the heavens, not in any state to greet a king.

They give her an old gown that had been dragged from the bottom of some wardrobe - it looked as if it had once been a rich, blood red but the colours had long since faded from it. The fashion was outdated - it had a high collar, slashed sleeves with black fabric beneath and bronze buttons all down the side - she hadn’t wanted to wear anything revealing in front of the black brothers and risk their self restraint becoming lax, and was pleased at how little skin was showing.

The original owner was clearly taller than her, and the hem dragged against the floor. Jo took a knife to the front of it so she didn’t trip and hoped the King wouldn’t be too offended at the shabbiness.

She had never met Stannis before, but she told herself he couldn’t be any scarier than the Thenns, who ate their enemies, and entered the solar she’d been directed to with a knock, uncomfortably aware of her escort’s eyes burning into her back.

A log fire was burning in the fireplace, and a middle-aged man was bent over a desk, writing something with a grey goose feather quill. He looked up at her, sighed, and put down the quill.

“You are Ned Stark’s bastard?”

Jo nods. “Yes, your Grace.”

“It is customary to curtsey to a king upon introduction,” Stannis hints. For a moment, Jo considers it - but then she thinks of Yves, her darling Yves, and her legs stay straight as a pole.

“We do not kneel.” she told him.

“So I’ve been told,” the king grumbles, before surprisingly dropping the matter. A seed of something like respect is planted in Jo’s mind for the man before her. “I understand you are pregnant, my lady?”

“I am no lady,” Jo says on instinct, before answering, “Yes.”

Stannis nods, and gestures for her to sit.

“As it stands,” he explains, “With all of yours siblings either presumed dead or lost, you and your child are next in line to Winterfell.”

“I am a bastard,” she reminds the king.

“But your child won’t be,” he reminds her, “I have been assured that in wildling custom, you and your husband were wed.”

“That’s true, but-”

“I need a Stark in Winterfell,” Stannis cuts her off, meeting her eyes with his own deep blue ones, “and you are the closest thing to a Stark I have.”

“I thought the Boltons held my home?” Jo said, instead of confronting the alien idea that was being proposed, although her deflection didn’t make her hands stop shaking beneath the table.

“Currently,” Stannis said, “but not for much longer. I will be bringing the fight to them shortly, and restoring the Starks to their proper place.”

Jo sensed a catch. “As long as...?”

Stannis almost smiled, then. “As long as the Northerners join my cause to regain the Iron Throne from the Lannisters, and that one of my men is installed as the next Lord.”

Jo is not a stupid woman.

“You mean to marry me off,” she said, with little emotion. But below the surface, her mind was racing.

“Your child,” Stannis tells her, “will be the legal heir, no matter what child comes after.”

It is meant to comfort her, and it almost does.

“I have no desire to marry again,” she says.

“We have all had to do things we didn’t want to,” Stannis tells her.

“Yves... my husband... he has not even been dead a fortnight.”

(Yves was dead.)

“You seem to think you have a choice in this matter,” Stannis says, “For the good of the North, for the good of the kingdom, even for your child, you must marry again.”

“Well, your Grace,” Jo laughs, seeing no way out of the situation at that moment, a slightly hysterical sound. “I must admit I was never quite so desirable before. The baseborn child of a great lord, now half a member of the free folk. It seems all it takes for your marriage prospects to look up is the rest of your family being slaughtered.”

She hears Stannis’ teeth grinding, the only sound for a few moment in the king’s solar.

“I am sorry, for your loss,” he finally says, the platitudes sounding out of place in his mouth, “but you must realize that this is the only option available anymore. Do you want your father and brother’s legacies to be those of traitors? Do you want, after eight thousand years, the Stark name to die out?”

“Of course not,” Jo says quietly. “But I want to mourn my husband too. I want to go somewhere south, far south, where the Others can’t get me and my child. Yves didn’t care about a birthright, and neither do I, not if it means our child’s life.”

“As long as the Wall stands,” Stannis tells her, “there will be no need for that. No need for running.”

Jo laughs then, and Stannis looks taken aback at the sound.

“Your Grace,” she says, “with respect, I have been running for as long as I can remember.”

**...**

“You respect her,” Selyse accuses her husband later, as they watch the last Stark walk away from them in her makeshift dress, after many hours of debating and compromising, “Why? She is the bastard of a traitor and a tavern slut, and half a child, half a wildling besides.”

“Perhaps,” Stannis says, “but that wasn’t Ned Stark’s way. She has more of him in her than I had thought she would.”

“You hated Ned Stark,” Selyse reminds him.

“I hated that Robert loved him more than his own blood brothers,” Stannis corrects her, “I never hated him. I respected the man’s honour and resolve.”

“So,” she says, “she will marry one of the Queen’s Men?”

“Yes,” he says, “but she has some interesting conditions.”

**...**

Even with Stannis’ support, and the voices of Grenn, Edd and Sam as well as their friends in the Watch, it still takes almost a month - a month they don’t have - to convince the Lord Commander to the first of Jo’s stipulations.

Denys Mallister had narrowly won the election against Janos Slynt and Cotter Pyke, his high birth being suspected to be the factor that pushed him above the other two front runners - Slynt being a butcher’s son, and Pyke being born of a wench from the Iron Islands. He was an old man, but still with all his teeth and graceful in his movement, and his mind was as sharp and stubborn as ever.

“The Watch has kept the wildlings at bay for eight thousand years,” he told them all, “and now you want me to open the gates to them, welcome them into the Seven Kingdoms like old friends?”

“No,” Sam told him, “not friends. We’re not friends. But if they’re left out there, with the Others-”

“Others!” the Lord Commander scoffed, “A fairy story.”

“No,” Jo told him, stepping forward for the first time. His eyes met hers, and he saw they were as hard and cold as ice, “Not a story. Not anymore. The wildlings might be old enemies, but they’re human too. The Others will slaughter them, and then they’ll rise again as undead, and they’ll come for us next. Think, Lord Commander - why would somebody build an eight hundred foot wall if they weren’t trying to keep something out?”

“We have fought the wildlings for millennia-”

“Then isn’t it time we _stop?”_ Jo slung back at him, “Women and children will die out there, and if all one hundred thousand of the free folk rise against the Wall, it won’t hold for long. Either way, they’re getting through. Let the bloodshed end, the Gift was given to you for the sole purpose of homes, but now it’s an empty stretch of land. Let the wildlings winter there. They won’t harm anyone.”

“All they do is harm!” Lord Mallister shouted, shaking his veined fist, “They pillage and steal and kill!”

“So do we!” she snapped back, slamming her fist on the desk, “But that doesn’t mean every soul in Westeros deserves to be condemned for the faults of a few. And if I remember correctly, the Wall houses pillagers and thieves and killers, calls them brothers. The free folk are our natural allies right now - they are human, and they deserve to be saved. And you are the only one who can save them.”

Mallister breathed out, and put his head in his hands. “Answer me this, girl,” he said to her, quieter. “You were kidnapped from your bed still a child by a wildling, away from your family. When you return at long last, your family is gone. Your father and siblings dead, a new great house installed in their place. Do you not hate?”

(Yves was dead.)

“Yes,” she said, simply, “I hate. I hate so much I feel as if I will spit acid. Yves was not perfect, but neither are you or I. I hate the Boltons, but I can do nothing for my family. I hate the Freys, but I could not have stopped them breaking guest right. I hate the Lannisters, but one bastard girl could not have turned the tide in a war. If I had stayed I simply would have ended up dead, like them. But there is no time for my hate anymore. You swore to protect the realms of men, and the free folk are men just like you and I. Open the gates to the wildlings, keep your oath. Let go of the hate, I beg you.”

Mallister’s old eyes dipped to the solar’s desk, and he let out a long sigh, before opening his mouth to speak.

**...**

The gate is cranked open on a harsh, blustery day. The ground was covered in thick snow, and Jo felt a burst of triumph burn in her heart. She had done it.

Her people were safe.

There were gaping holes in the procession from the Battle, but Jo recognised faces she hadn’t seen in what felt like a lifetime.

Wun Wun walked several heads taller than the rest, and Tormund’s red hair was bright against the snowy backdrop, as he had finally been released from his ice cell. Little children stumbled through the gate with large eyes, others staring unabashedly at the crows they’d been told horror stories about. Val comes over to her the moment their eyes meet, carrying Dalla’s child who is soon to be named, but neither her sister nor Mance anywhere in sight.

“ _Corn, corn_ ,” a raven that perched on the Lord Commander’s shoulder screamed, before diving low and screeching _“Snow! Snow!”_

Across the courtyard, Jo meets Stannis Baratheon’s eyes and nods. She knows without his backing that the Lord Commander would never have been swayed to even consider the idea.

 _I have played my part,_ Stannis’ eyes told her, _now you play yours._

**...**

That night she is visited by Selyse Baratheon, bearing what seemed to be a dozen gowns that had materialized from thin air.

“My king has told me of the plan you have hatched,” the Queen was tall and thin, with large ears and sharp features. She looked at Jo as if she were a bug to be squashed, but Jo still thanked her for the dresses. She had not had to gift them.

“It suited both my needs and his,” Jo tells her, preparing for another battle like the one she’d had with the King.

Queen Selyse’s eyes narrow at Jo’s lack of deference, not even a curtsey or a ‘your Grace’ in sight. “So,” she says, “it is true. You are one of them.”

Jo was under no apprehensions about who ‘they’ were.

“Savages,” the queen continued, “that have plagued these kingdoms for generations, since the last long night, and all it takes to get them through the wall is a pregnant bastard girl deigning to marry a lord she should have begged to wed her in other circumstances.”

Jo let the Queen’s words wash over her like a roaring tide. She was a wolf, a daughter of Winterfell, she was free. “They are human beings,” Jo told her, making Selyse’s nostrils flare in anger, “just like you and me. Their ancestors were on the wrong side of the Wall, that’s all.”

“You impudent-” the Queen began.

“You husband has agreed, and done his part.” Jo said sharply, “I will do mine. Thank you for the dresses, your Grace, they are beautiful.”

Selyse looked as if she had swallowed a lemon, torn between shouting at Jo for being everything a lady shouldn’t be, or forgiving her for using her title a wildling would never use.

“You are welcome,” the thin woman finally said, before turning on her heel and disappearing into the night.

...

The dresses had, of course, not appeared from thin air. Under scrutiny, Jo saw that only half were her size, the others all made for a taller woman. They had probably been taken from the Queen’s ladies’ wardrobes, and the colours varied as much as the sizes.

In the end, Jo split them beneath herself and Val, who at first tried not to look interested in the southron gowns, but by the end of the night was giggling along with Jo about the soft material, odd lacings and tight belts.

“I never wanted to be a princess, no matter how many times you told me I looked like one,” Val told her as they lay in the southron undergarments that Selyse had also given Jo, the dresses splayed around them after a night of swapping and trying on and taking off too-large bows or unnecessary frills, “but I feel like one right now. And it feels good.”

“I never saw Princess Myrcella,” Jo tells her sleepily, “but she had been coming to Winterfell when I was stolen, along with the king and queen. She must have worn dresses finer than this every day. I wonder if she ever wanted just to wear leathers like I often did.”

“That wasn’t a princess really, was it, though?” Val asked, “She was an abomination. Like those brothers of hers.”

“I don’t know,” Jo says, “I suppose Sansa and Arya became princesses when Robb was crowned King. Sansa always wanted to be a princess. But Arya- Arya would have hated it. I wonder if she ever knew that she was, that she was-”

Jo felt a tear rolling down her cheek and touched the bead of salt water, looking at the wetness on the tip of her finger.

“She was your sister,” Val says, “and a princess. What’s the difference between a lady and a princess? Or a princess and a queen? Or a princess and a wildling? Or a princess and a monster?”

“Not much.” Jo decides, before snuggling into Val’s side.

“Will your baby be a princess or a prince?” the blonde girl asked, and Jo shrugged.

“Probably neither. I’m still a bastard, and no matter what Stannis says nobody will ever accept my baby as any better than me. Have you ever heard of a bastard princess?”

“She could be the first,” Val says, “and you could be a bastard lady and I could be a wildling queen.”

“Yves wouldn’t have wanted any of it,” Jo said, suddenly. “He would have said we looked like something we weren’t in these dresses. He would have said I wasn’t a lady or a princess or anything but his wife. He would have said-”

Val pulled Jo into a hug, tight and warm, the lace on her smallclothes scratching at Jo’s skin. “Don’t think of that,” Val tells her, “don’t think of him. We don’t know what he’d want.”

“I miss him.” Jo says in a small voice, “I miss him. I love him.”

“The dead don’t need love,” Val says, stroking Jo’s hair methodically, “only the living.”

“But I still- I still love-”

Val kept on stroking her hair and rubbing her back, and Jo pushed her face into Val’s shoulder so her sobs were muffled.

“I know, I know.” the wildling hushed her friend, but Jo barely even heard her.

(Yves was dead.)

...

Jo can feel the eyes of all the men in the hall turn to her as she walks in. She had settled on a dark purple gown made of satin, and she felt like disappearing into the ground.

At Winterfell no one had ever looked at her like this.

But, at Winterfell she hadn’t been whatever she was now. Half free, half trapped, pregnant, grown up and wearing a finer gown than she ever did at Winterfell; Lady Stark had insisted that her dresses were always made of cheap, dark material so she blended into the background with the servants and maids.

She had hoped this dress would do the same: whilst at Winterfell, she had wanted nothing more than to wear the same beautiful gowns at Sansa and Arya had got to wear, and now she was she wanted nothing more to be in her wildling furs, or her dark, cheap dresses again: she wanted to disappear.

However it didn’t seem as if there’d be any escape route now. At Winterfell, Jo reminded herself, she had been a scared little girl. Here she was a woman of the free folk, who had saved a hundred thousand lives with a promise of marriage. She tried to sit straighter as she smiled queasily at some joke Tormund made too loudly that gained the wildlings allowed in the hall looks of distrust and disgust.

Yves would have laughed loudly, not caring who heard or tutted at him, but Yves was not here.

(Yves was dead.)

Throughout the solemn, fragile atmosphere that encased the dining hall of Castle Black, Jo quietly sipped at her broth, half listening to Val and Tormund and the others snickering about southroners, and scanning the hall for her suitors. They were not marked in any way except by their wealth and they way they looked at her, but she supposed they thought they were being subtle, the way their eyes flicked down to their plates the moment her head turned their way.

She counted six, at the end of the meal, and she didn’t know the name of a single one: a stout man with Queen Selyse’s ears, a dark haired man with pox-scarred skin, a tall man with a brawny frame and a arrogant set to his shoulders, a smiling blond knight, and a man with eyes almost as black as her own.

Jo hated them all on sight.

She flexed her fingers beneath the table, and dug her nails into her palm. She couldn’t show her hate, not yet, but she could think. She could beat the older three easily, she had no doubt, age winning those battles for her, and the big one looked too cocky to have much finesse - the smiling knight and the pox-scarred man were the only two that gave her pause. The blond man seemed fit and she knew better than to assume he didn’t know how to use the sword on his hip, and although he didn’t seem physically imposing he was sitting among the King’s favourites - he may have more fight in him than it first seemed. And the scarred man had his mouth at such an angle that Jo could see his determination, and physically he matched her. Determination was a dangerous thing to fight against when the stakes were set so high.

 _I will not marry again,_ she promises Yves’ ghost, _you will be my one and only._

She tried not to think of how lonely a life that sounded. As Stannis stood to announce the next day’s proceedings, how the title of Jo’s husband and Lord of Winterfell would fall to any man who could best her in battle, Jo stared blankly at her empty bowl, eyes glazed over.

Her hand rubbed her stomach methodically, and for the first time she felt a tiny kick.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, please leave kudos and reviews if you like it, as they mean a ridiculous amount to me :)


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